The Israeli military says its warplanes are hitting Hezbollah targets in Lebanon after detecting moves to fire missiles and rockets into Israel.

“In a self-defence act to remove these threats, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is striking terror targets,” IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said.

Israel said Lebanese civilians had been warned to immediately leave areas where Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shia Muslim group, was operating.

Shortly afterwards, Hezbollah said it had launched a large-scale drone attack on Israel in response to last month’s killing of the group’s senior military commander.

Across northern Israel sirens warning of incoming rockets were heard sounding early on Sunday.

There were no immediate reports of any injuries.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was convening an urgent meeting of his security cabinet.

Israel has been exchanging fire with the Lebanon-based militant group since the start of the war last October with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

German police have arrested a man suspected of killing three people and injuring another eight in Friday’s knife attack in the western city of Solingen, a regional minister has said.

“The man we’ve really been looking for the whole day has just been taken into custody,” Herbert Reul, the interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, told ARD public TV late on Saturday.

He gave no details, but Germany’s Bild and Spiegel news websites reported that the suspect, in dirty blood-stained clothes, had given himself up.

Two men, aged 56 and 67, and a 56-year-old woman were stabbed to death during a festival, in what Chancellor Olaf Scholz described as a “horrific act”.

“We have found evidence,” Mr Reul told ARD Tagesthemen news.

The minister said he was the man “we most suspected”.

A state interior ministry spokesman confirmed that the man had turned himself in.

This was the third arrest on Saturday, following the stabbing attack that shocked Germany.

Earlier police said a man was detained at a refugee centre close to the site of the attack.

Bild reported that special task force (SEK) officers stormed the refugee centre, arresting a suspect.

It said the building was located about 300m (984ft) from Fronhof – Solingen’s central market square where people were stabbed on Friday night.

That arrest came a few hours after a 15-year-old boy was detained. Officials said he was not the main suspect – but was alleged to have known about the attack.

The Islamic State group on Saturday claimed responsibility for the attack.

It did not immediately provide any evidence and it was not clear how close any relationship with the attacker was.

The attacker reportedly stabbed passers-by at random during a festival to celebrate 650 years since the industrial city of Solingen was founded.

The situation in the square after the attack was “very hectic”, which made it difficult to find the perpetrator, the police said.

They also confirmed that the attacker “targeted” people’s throats and necks.

Solingen – a city famous for its steel industry – has about 160,000 inhabitants. It lies about 25km (15 miles) east of Düsseldorf.

The city’s authorities asked people to leave the Fronhof area after the attack at about 22:00 local time (21:00 BST) on Friday.

The planned three-day celebrations of the city anniversary – for which about 75,000 people had been expected – were cancelled after the attack.

Solingen Mayor Tim Kurzbach later said that “all of us in Solingen are in shock, horror and great sadness.

“It breaks my heart that an attack has happened in our city. I have tears in my eyes when I think of those we’ve lost.

“I pray for all those still fighting for their lives. Also my greatest sympathy for all those who had to experience this, these images must have been horrific.”

The entrance to Fronhof is now being guarded by police.

People have been bringing flowers and candles to the site of the attack that shocked the entire country.

Players from Germany’s top Bundesliga football league wore black armbands during Saturday’s matches.

French police say they have arrested a man suspected of setting fires and causing an explosion outside a synagogue in a southern resort.

Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said “the alleged perpetrator” was detained on Saturday. He added that the police had shown “great professionalism”.

French media reported that the suspect was shot and injured by police after he opened fire on the officers who came to arrest him in the city of Nîmes.

Earlier on Saturday, a police officer was injured in the blast outside the Beth Yaacov synagogue in the nearby seaside resort of La Grande-Motte.

The police officer’s injuries are not said to be life-threatening, following the blast between 08:00 and 08:30 local time (07:00-07:30 BST) on Saturday.

Five people, including the rabbi, were inside the synagogue at the time, authorities said.

The explosion was caused by two cars which were set alight outside

Police sources told French media that one of the vehicles contained a hidden gas canister.

The suspect – who was reportedly carrying a Palestinian flag – also set fire to several entrance doors of the synagogue.

Jewish community leader Yonathan Arfi said the incident was “an attempt to kill Jews” and seemed to have been timed to target Saturday morning worshippers.

President Emmanuel Macron said the incident was “a terrorist act”.

One eyewitness, who asked to remain anonymous, told the BBC: “Just as we were coming round the last corner, there was a huge explosion – a fireball into the air.

“It was surreal, like a film. We didn’t go any further.”

Prime Minister Gabriel Attal and Mr Darmanin visited the site on Saturday evening. Both had earlier condemned the attack, with Mr Attal calling it “an antisemitic act”.

“What happened here shocks and scandalises all Republicans in our country,” Mr Attat said during the visit.

“Because the reality is that once again, French Jews have been targeted, attacked because of their beliefs.”

Mr Attal said an “absolute tragedy” had been “narrowly avoided” as “there would have been victims” if the synagogue had been full of worshippers.

Both Mr Attal and Mr Darmanin said security would be strengthened outside synagogues.

“I want to assure our Jewish fellow citizens and the municipality of my full support,” Mr Darmanin said earlier in the day.

The French Jewish community already live under high security, with many synagogues and Jewish schools under police protection.

A January 2024 report by the Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) said there had been a nearly threefold increase of antisemitic acts in France between 2022 and 2023.

In May, police shot dead a man after a synagogue in the north-western city of Rouen was set on fire.

In 2015, two days after the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine, four people were murdered in a hostage attack on a kosher supermarket.

The explosion comes amid heightened concerns for Europe’s Jewish community, after the latest survey from the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) published last month found that Jewish people in the bloc continue to face high levels of antisemitism.

More than 8,000 Jews in 13 EU countries, including Germany and France, were interviewed. Some 96% said they had encountered antisemitism in their daily lives.

There has been widespread condemnation of the attempted arson attack across France’s political spectrum.

Left-wing politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon called it an “intolerable crime”, while the far-right National Rally’s Jordan Bardella said it was “a criminal and antisemitic act”.

Having a pet crocodile in the backyard sounds like a far-fetched Australian fable – like riding kangaroos to school or the existence of drop bears.

But in the Northern Territory (NT), it’s a reality.

And Trevor Sullivan has 11 of the reptiles sharing his tropical home in Batchelor, about an hour south of Darwin.

Among them is Big Jack, who is named after a Jack in the Box toy due to his alarming propensity for lunging. Despite his antics, the giant predator is adored, having joined Mr Sullivan’s household as a hatchling the same day his daughter was born 22 years ago.

“He’s been part of our family ever since… [my daughter] refers to him as brother.”

Also on the 80-acre property is Cricket, still a tiny critter, and Shah, who – at the complete other end of the scale – is more than a century old and has truly lived a life.

“He’s possibly seen two world wars and maybe federation in Australia [in 1901],” Mr Sullivan says of the 4.7m (15.4ft) beast.

He claims Shah once killed a man, has been used for scientific research, was almost poisoned to death at a bird park, and lost half his bottom jaw in a fight at a Queensland crocodile farm, all before joining Mr Sullivan a few years ago.

The 60-year-old lights up as he tells the BBC about his crocodiles: “There’s nothing like them… crocodiles are the Harley Davidson of pets.”

But as the famously quirky region heads to the polls on Saturday, the right to own a pet croc has turned into a somewhat unlikely – and very Territory – election issue.

The cost of living, housing and crime are the prime concerns for many voters, but Mr Sullivan is one of scores left heartbroken after the governing Labor Party moved to ban crocodiles as pets.

It is one of the last places in the country the practice is allowed, but the government says they’re concerned for the wellbeing of both humans and the reptiles. The Country Liberal Party opposition, however, has pledged its support for the practice and has promised a review of the “rushed” decision if elected.

About 250,000 people call the NT home, but relatively few of them own crocodiles. The environment minister’s office said they could not provide a figure because the government is in election caretaker mode, but previous estimates have put the number of permit holders at around 100.

Many of the captive crocs are raised from hatchlings, others rehomed from farms or after causing trouble in the wild.

Regulations have long dictated strict conditions about where, and under what conditions, the animals can be kept. For example, hatchlings can only live in urban areas until they are 60cm long – usually about a year old – at which point they must be handed over to authorities or moved to a property outside the town limits.

Under those rules, however, owners were not required to have any special training or knowledge to keep the beasts.

Tom Hayes says owning – or “saving” – a crocodile is part of the Territory’s appeal, and one of the factors which drew his young family to the Darwin region, from Queensland, earlier this year.

The 40-year-old grew up taking trips to the NT with his dad, fishing in the Mary River alongside giant crocodiles, instilling a love of predators and, eventually, a dream to have his own one day.

“I’m not just some dude that wants a crocodile [for] when I’m having a barbecue with my mates on the weekend,” the tattooist and self-styled conservationist told the BBC.

“I wanted to have somewhere I could bring these poor old buggers and they could just live their lives out – happy, fed… not having to worry about people shooting them.”

He was in process of adopting a mega croc when the NT government announced it would not be issuing any new permits to keep the reptiles as pets.

It has left Mr Hayes reeling and the crocodile he’d hoped to rescue at risk of being put down.

NT Environment Minister Kate Worden said the decision was made “after public consultation” and “taking into account personal safety and animal welfare concerns”.

Existing permits will remain valid, but transfers of permits will not be allowed.

“Let’s remember they are an apex predator and probably not one that’s best kept for captivity,” Ms Worden told reporters, adding that there were instances of crocodiles attacking their owners in the region.

The new rules bring the NT in in line with every other state and territory in Australia – except, oddly, Victoria, which is well outside of the comfortable climate of a saltwater crocodile.

Animal activists, who had been pushing for the change, say it’s a big win.

While some of the people keeping crocodiles “may have good intentions”, no wild animal can have its needs fully met in captivity, argues Olivia Charlton, from World Animal Protection.

“There is no way to replicate the space and freedom these crocodiles would have in the wild, particularly given they live for up to 70 years,” she said in a statement.

Charles Giliam, from the RSPCA NT, said the dangerous nature of crocodiles also made it extremely hard for authorities to regulate the program and ensure the reptiles had an acceptable standard of living and medical care.

“I only know one vet who’s prepared to work with crocodiles,” he said, as an example.

But croc owners say they had no idea the change was coming and are distressed over what may now happen to their pets.

“I don’t think you spend many nights on the couch watching TV, snuggling with your four-and-a-half-meter crocodile… but there’s still that emotional attachment,” Mr Hayes says.

They accuse the government of hiding the change in a broader Crocodile Management Plan to avoid doing true consultation on the issue.

The opposition environment spokeswoman Jo Hersey said “the [Country Liberal Party] supports the rights of Territorians to own crocs as pets under a permit system” and has promised the party will look at the rules if elected.

Both Mr Hayes and Mr Sullivan said there is broad support for greater training and education requirements for permit holders.

But they say the reptiles are surprisingly easy to care for – and reject arguments that keeping them as pets is harmful.

“In the wild, they have a stretch of territory and they then have to fight to keep it. They’re forever hunting for food, forever chasing off their enemies or trying to keep their girlfriend sorted and life’s pretty tough going,” Mr Sullivan says.

“In captivity, if they got a good enclosure, plenty of water, sunlight, a bit of shade, and food on a regular basis, they just love it.

“I have a river running through my property and I actually have wild crocs always trying to get in and join my mob.”

The decision to end the practice is particularly bad timing for Mr Sullivan. He listed his home and his menagerie for sale last year, so he could join his partner in New Zealand.

“It is a bit like a Willy Wonka story – I want some young kids, of the right nature, to take on a property full of wildlife.”

But that’s left him with a quandary that belongs in a maths textbook: If you have 80 acres and 11 crocodiles on the market, but zero permits available to transfer, what’s the answer?

There is “not a chance” he’ll euthanise his crocs, he says. “I’ll have to stay on the property until I die, or until something else changes.”

His hope is resting on the election of a CLP government on Saturday, adding he thinks it is an issue which will galvanise voters.

But Mr Hayes, on the other hand, hopes it isn’t. There are greater issues at play which should decide votes, he explains, and he is optimistic that both parties will come to see sense anyway.

“Whoever’s in needs to really look at it… It’s an attack on the Territory way of life.”

An anthropomorphic monkey and a campaign against “feminist propaganda” set the video gaming community alight this week, following the release of the most successful Chinese title of all time.

Many players were furious after the company behind Black Myth: Wukong sent them a list of topics to avoid while livestreaming the game, including “feminist propaganda, fetishisation, and other content that instigates negative discourse”.

Still, within 24 hours of its release on Tuesday, it became the second most-played game ever on streaming platform Steam, garnering more than 2.1 million concurrent players and selling more than 4.5 million copies.

The game, based on the classic 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, is being seen as a rare example of popular media broadcasting Chinese stories on an international stage.

Black Myth: Wukong is a single-player action game where players take on the role of “the Destined One”- an anthropomorphic monkey with supernatural powers.

The Destined One is based on the character of Sun Wukong, or the Monkey King, a key character in Journey to the West.

That novel, considered one of the greats of Chinese literature, draws heavily from Chinese mythology as well as Confucianism, Taoist and Buddhist folklore.

It has inspired hundreds of international films, TV shows and cartoons, including the popular Japanese anime series Dragon Ball Z and the 2008 Chinese-American fantasy film The Forbidden Kingdom.

First announced via a hugely popular teaser trailer in August 2020, Black Myth launched on Tuesday after four years of anticipation.

It is the Chinese video game industry’s first AAA release – a title typically given to big-budget games from major companies.

High-end graphics, sophisticated game design and hot-blooded hype have all contributed to its success – as well as the size of China’s gaming community, which is the largest in the world.

“It’s not just a Chinese game targeting the Chinese market or the Chinese-speaking world,” Haiqing Yu, a professor at Australia’s RMIT University, whose research specialises in the sociopolitical and economic impact of China’s digital media, told the BBC.

“Players all over the world [are playing] a game that has a Chinese cultural factor.”

This has become a huge source of national pride in the country.

The Department of Culture and Tourism in Shanxi Province, an area that includes many locations and set pieces featured in the game, released a video on Tuesday that showcased the real-world attractions, triggering a surge in tourism dubbed “Wukong Travel”.

Videos posted on TikTok in the wake of Black Myth’s release show tourists flooding temples and shrines featured in the game, in what one X user characterised as a “successful example of cultural rediscovery”.

Niko Partners, a company that researches and analyses video games markets and consumers in Asia, similarly pointed out that Black Myth “helps showcase Chinese mythology, traditions, culture and real-life locations in China to the world”.

Ahead of Black Myth’s release, some content creators and streamers revealed that a company affiliated with its developer had sent them a list of topics to avoid talking about while livestreaming the game: including “feminist propaganda, fetishisation, and other content that instigates negative discourse”.

While it is not clear what was precisely meant by “feminist propaganda”, a widely circulated report by video game publication IGN in November revealed a history of sexist and inappropriate behaviour from employees of Game Science, the studio behind Black Myth.

Other topics designated as “Don’ts” in the document, which has been widely shared on social media and YouTube, included politics, Covid-19, and China’s video game industry policies.

The directive, which was sent out by co-publisher Hero Games, has stoked controversy outside China.

Multiple content creators refused to review the game, claiming its developers were trying to censor discussion and stifle freedom of speech.

Others chose to directly defy the warnings.

One creator with the username Moonmoon launched a Twitch stream of Black Myth titled “Covid-19 Isolation Taiwan (Is a Real Country) Feminism Propaganda”. Another streamer, Rui Zhong, discussed China’s one-child policy on camera while playing the game.

On Thursday, Chinese social media platform Weibo banned 138 users who were deemed to be violating its guidelines when discussing Black Myth.

According to an article on the state-run Global Times news site, a number of the banned Weibo users were “deviating from discussing the game itself but instead using it as a platform for spreading ‘gender opposition,’ ‘personal attacks’, and other irrational comments”.

While the controversy has attracted a lot of attention in international media and online, it has not really dented or detracted from Black Myth’s overwhelmingly positive reception.

The game made $53m in presales alone, with another 4.5 million copies sold within 24 hours of its release. Within the same timeframe it broke the record for the most-played single-player title ever released on Steam.

On platforms like Weibo, Reddit and YouTube, and elsewhere, reams of comments are celebrating the game’s success. Many suggest that the fallout from the controversies surrounding the game’s release has been overblown.

Ms Yu agreed, describing Black Myth as an “industry and overall market success”.

“When it comes to Chinese digital media and communication platforms, of course people cannot avoid talking about censorship,” she said. “Black Myth is… an example of how to tell the Chinese story well, and how to expand Chinese cultural influence globally. I don’t see any censorship there.”

She also pointed out that apparent attempts to steer or censor what reviewers said were unlikely to have come from Chinese officials themselves. More likely, Ms Yu suggested, is that the list of “Dos” and “Don’ts” came from a company that was trying to keep itself out of trouble.

“The company issues their notification so if anybody from the central government comes to have a chat with the company, the company can say, ‘look, I already told them. I can’t stop people from saying what they want to say.’

“They have basically, to use the colloquial term, covered their own ass,” she concluded. “I view it as a politically correct gesture to the Chinese censors, rather than a real directive coming from the top down.”

Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov has been arrested by French police at an airport north of Paris.

Mr Durov was detained after his private jet had landed at Le Bourget Airport, French media reported.

According to officials the 39-year-old had been arrested under a warrant for offences related to the popular messaging app.

Russia’s embassy in France is taking “immediate steps” to clarify the situation, according to Russia’s TASS state news agency.

Durov had been travelling on his private jet, French TV channel TF1 said on its website.

Telegram is particularly popular in Russia, Ukraine and former Soviet Union states.

The app was banned in Russia in 2018, after a previous refusal by Mr Durov to hand over user data.

But the ban was reversed in 2021.

Telegram is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Wechat.

Mr Durov founded Telegram in 2013 and he left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform, which he sold.

Until midnight last Sunday, Matteo Cannia was sitting out on a bench overlooking the sea in Porticello. It was too hot to sleep.

The 78-year-old, a fisherman since the age of 10, saw the first flashes of lightning. “I heard the thunder and the wind and decided to go home,” he told me.

“As the storm grew, everyone woke. Water was coming into my friend’s house.”

At about 04:15 local time, Fabio Cefalù – a fisherman who had been due to go out that wild Monday morning but, like others, decided against it – suddenly saw a flare go up.

He changed his mind and went out to sea to find out what was going on – and discovered only cushions and floating planks of wood.

A luxury super yacht called the Bayesian, moored only a few hundred metres away, had already sunk.

It all happened in a 16-minute window of disaster, chaos and torment, which catapulted a sleepy Sicilian fishing port to the centre of world news.

All but seven of the 22 passengers of the Bayesian had scrambled into a life raft as the yacht began to capsize. The others never made it out.

Charlotte Golunski, a British woman, was thrown into the water with her one-year-old daughter, Sophie. She told of clutching her baby in the air with all her strength to keep her from drowning. “It was all black around me,” she said, “and the only thing I could hear were the screams of others.”

She, her baby, and her husband James were among those rescued by a nearby sailing boat captain. Trapped inside the sinking Bayesian was her colleague Mike Lynch – one of the UK’s top tech entrepreneurs, dubbed “Britain’s Bill Gates”.

Mr Lynch had brought together family, friends and colleagues for an idyllic holiday on his luxury boat: a sumptuous 56-metre (184ft) sailing yacht that won design awards and had the world’s tallest aluminium mast.

In June, he was acquitted after a lengthy trial in the US on charges that he had fraudulently inflated the value of his company, Autonomy, before selling it to Hewlett Packard in 2011. The trip was planned as a celebration of freedom to mark his rehabilitation in public opinion.

Three days after the yacht went down, his body was retrieved by divers from the wreckage.

A day later, the body of his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, who was due to begin studying at the University of Oxford next month, was recovered.

Among the others who died were the president of the investment bank Morgan Stanley, Jonathan Bloomer, and his wife Judy; Mr Lynch’s lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda; and the yacht’s chef, Recaldo Thomas. Mr Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, survived.

The family has released a statement talking of their “unspeakable grief”, adding they are “devastated and in shock”.

How the super yacht sank so quickly while other smaller vessels nearby survived the storm undamaged has dumbfounded experts.

In a press conference this weekend – the first public statement by officials since the disaster – local prosecutors said they had begun an investigation into potential crimes of manslaughter and negligent shipwreck.

The region’s state prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio told reporters that while the probe was at a very early stage and nobody specific was being investigated, there were “many possibilities for culpability. It could be just the captain. It could be the whole crew… we are absolutely not ruling anything out”.

A small team of British marine investigators has also been sent to Sicily to work with their Italian counterparts.

Prosecutors said that they now believed a downburst was the weather phenomenon that hit the ship: a localised, powerful wind that descends from a thunderstorm and spreads unpredictably.

That contradicted previous reports that had identified the cause as a waterspout, or mini tornado at sea.

Either way, it’s clear extreme weather played a major role.

Much of the focus for the investigation team is of course on the conduct of the captain, 51-year-old James Cutfield from New Zealand. He survived, along with eight of his crew, and is being questioned.

“We didn’t see it coming,” he told Italian media, alluding to the storm, in his only public comment so far.

The problem is: plenty of others did. Violent winds and rain were forecast, following days of searing heat. The head of the company that built the Bayesian, Giovanni Costantino, told me he was convinced there had been a litany of errors on board.

“At the back of the boat, a hatch must have been left open,” he said, “but also perhaps a side entrance for water to have poured inside.

“Before the storm, the captain should have closed every opening, lifted anchor, turned on the engine, pointed into the wind and lowered the keel.”

A keel is a large, fin-like part of the boat that protrudes from its base.

“That would have stabilised the vessel, they would have been able to traverse the storm and continue their cruise in comfort,” he said.

Rescuers instead found the wreckage of the Bayesian 50 metres underwater with its almost 10-metre-long keel raised.

Had it been deployed, it could have helped counter the wind buffeting the Bayesian’s 75-metre high aluminium mast and kept the ship stable. But without it, experts told the newspaper La Repubblica that gusts of 100 kilometres an hour (62mph) would have been enough to capsize the ship – and Monday’s storm far exceeded that.

“The Bayesian was a model for many other vessels because of its stability and exceptionally high performance,” Mr Costantino said. “There was absolutely no problem with it. If water hadn’t surged in, it was unsinkable.”

He told me there were 16 minutes between the power going out on the ship at 03:56 – showing that water was flooding areas with electrical circuits – and the GPS signal being lost, indicating the moment it sank.

That period, along with any measures taken to mitigate the extreme weather, will be pored over by investigators, particularly once they locate the vessel’s black box recorder.

Rino Casilli, one of Sicily’s top ship surveyors, similarly believes that errors may have made the yacht vulnerable to the extreme weather.

“There should have been two members of the crew taking turns to be on watch overnight, given the storm warning,” he told me as he took me out on his boat – around a third of the size of the Bayesian. “And it should have been moored in the harbour, not out at sea.”

It has not yet been established how many people, if any, were on watch that night.

From his sailing boat, we gained rare access to the spot where the Bayesian went down.

Around us, an Italian police vessel circulated, warning us back. Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity among divers, as other rescue vessels arrived.

We didn’t know at the time – but they had just located more bodies.

It was an intensely challenging operation for the teams to recover those trapped in the wreckage. Given its depth, at 50 metres underwater, each diver was allowed 10 minutes down before resurfacing for their safety – 120 dives in total. They were assisted by remote control vehicles that could operate on the seabed for far longer.

In this weekend’s press conference, rescuers said the passengers trapped inside during the sinking took refuge in cabins on the ship’s left side, where the last air bubbles formed.

Five of the bodies were found in the first cabin on the left, they said, while the last body – confirmed as Hannah Lynch – was in the third cabin on the left side.

Access for the emergency teams was extremely difficult since the yacht remained largely intact with its furniture obstructing entry.

The coastguard compared it to an “18-storey building full of water”. When Ms Lynch’s body was brought ashore emergency workers on the port applauded their colleagues.

All seven of the dead have been transported to a mortuary for post-mortems.

Rescuers will now need to decide whether – and how – to salvage the wreckage, which would undoubtedly offer vital clues as to what happened. But bringing the Bayesian to the surface could take six to eight weeks and cost 15 million euros (£12.7m) by some estimates.

While the divers’ painstaking work to recover the dead has ended, the investigators’ painful hunt for answers has only begun.

They and the survivors are hunkered down in a hotel close to Porticello, which is strictly off-limits to journalists. Security guards promptly asked us to leave.

Solving the enigma of what happened to the Bayesian will be crucial not only to help loved ones of the victims reach some sort of closure, but also for the maritime industry to draw conclusions.

The brother of James Cutfield, the captain, said he was a “well-respected” sailor who had worked on boats his whole life. Did the experienced sailor somehow make a series of catastrophic errors? The trade union Nautilus, which represents seafarers and captains, called for restraint in passing judgement on the Bayesian’s crew.

“Any attempt to question their conduct without the full facts is not only unfair but also harmful to the process of uncovering the truth and learning any lessons from this tragedy,” it said.

The world’s media has begun to leave Porticello, which is gradually returning to the tranquillity of its pre-Bayesian era. Stray cats roam among the old fishing boats, and children play as their families eat out at the few seaside restaurants.

But what has happened over the past week has stunned and scarred many here.

“Last Sunday night, we saw the end of the world in Porticello,” said resident Maria Vizzo. “We’ve never seen something like this. Everyone here is shocked – and everyone is crying.”

Two Nasa astronauts who have been stuck in space for over two months will return to Earth in February 2025 with SpaceX.

Nasa said the Boeing Starliner spacecraft the astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore had travelled to International Space Station (ISS) on would return to Earth “un-crewed”.

The pair took off on what was planned to be an eight-day mission on 5 June but will now spend around eight months in orbit.

The Starliner experienced problems on its way to the ISS, including leaks of helium, which pushes fuel into the propulsion system. Several thrusters also did not work properly.

Boeing and SpaceX were both awarded billion-dollar contracts by Nasa to provide commercial space flights for its astronauts. Boeing’s was worth $4.2bn (£3.18bn) while SpaceX, which was founded by billionaire Elon Musk, got $2.6bn.

SpaceX has so far sent nine crewed flights to space for Nasa, as well as some commercial missions, but this was Boeing’s first attempt at a crewed mission.

Engineers at Boeing and Nasa have spent months trying to understand the technical issues with the Starliner craft.

They have been carrying out tests and gathering data, both in space and back on the Earth. Their hope was to pin down the root of the problems and find a way to return the astronauts home safely on Starliner.

Speaking at a press conference on Saturday, Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson said Boeing has been working closely with Nasa to understand what improvements need to be made to the spacecraft.

“Space flight is a risk, even at its safest and even at its most routine, and a test flight, by nature, is neither safe nor routine,” he said.

“Our core value is safety and it is our north star.”

The decision has been made to extend the pair’s stay on the ISS until February 2025 so they can return on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft.

The extra time allows SpaceX to launch its next vehicle, with lift-off scheduled for the end of September.

It was supposed to have four astronauts on board, but will instead travel to the space station with two. This leaves room for Mr Wilmore and Ms Williams to join them in the vehicle to return to Earth at the end of its planned mission next February.

Nasa has said both astronauts had previously completed two long-duration stays in space and understood the risks of the test flight, including being aboard the station longer than planned.

The organisation said Mr Wilmore, 61, and Ms Williams, 58, both “fully” supported the plans for their return and would spend the next few months carrying out scientific work, space maintenance and possibly doing some “spacewalks”.

Boeing’s Starliner had already been delayed for several years because of setbacks in the spacecraft’s development. Previous un-crewed flights also suffered technical problems.

In a statement, Boeing said it continued to focus “on the safety of the crew and spacecraft”.

“We are executing the mission as determined by Nasa, and we are preparing for a safe and successful un-crewed return,” it added.

A landmark report into problems faced by women in the Malayalam-language film industry has revealed the deep rot in one of India’s most popular film hubs.

The findings of the three-member panel are pretty damning.

The 290-page report – parts of which have been redacted to hide identities of survivors and those accused of wrongdoing – says the industry is dominated by “a mafia of powerful men” and that “sexual harassment of women is rampant”.

Headed by a former judge of the Kerala High Court and set up by the state government in 2017, the Hema committee details the abysmal working conditions on sets – including a lack of toilets and changing rooms for junior artists, no food and water for them, poor pay and no accommodation or transport facilities.

“There are no toilets, so women have to go in the bushes or behind thick trees. During their periods, not being able to change their sanitary napkins for long hours and holding urine for long causes physical discomfort and makes them sick, in some cases needing hospitalisation,” it says.

The report, which was submitted to the government in December 2019, was made public only this week after nearly five years of delay and multiple legal challenges by members of the film industry.

The panel was set up in the aftermath of the horrific sexual assault on a leading actress in the film industry. Bhavana Menon, who has worked in more than 80 films in southern Indian languages and won a number of prestigious awards, was assaulted by a group of men while travelling from Thrissur to Kochi in February 2017.

Her assault made headlines, especially after Dileep, one of the Malayalam-language film industry’s biggest actors and Menon’s co-star in half a dozen films, was named as an accused and charged with criminal conspiracy. He denied the charges, but was arrested and held in custody for three months before being released on bail. The case continues to be heard in court.

Indian law bars identification of survivors of sexual assault, but it was known from the start that it was Ms Menon who had been assaulted. In 2022, she waived her anonymity in a post on Instagram and in an interview to the BBC.

A few months after the attack on Ms Menon, Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) – a group formed by some of her colleagues in a film industry known for its variety of successful mainstream and critically acclaimed films – petitioned the government, seeking swift action in the case and also to address the problems faced by women in cinema.

In the report, retired Justice K Hema says the WCC told her that “women are being silenced as the prestige of the film industry needs to be upheld”.

The panel interviewed several dozen men and women, including artists, producers, directors, scriptwriters, cinematographers, hairstylists, makeup artists and costume designers, and “gathered evidence including video and audio clips and WhatsApp messages”.

Describing sexual harassment as the “worst evil” women in cinema face, the report said the panellists saw evidence that “sexual harassment remains shockingly rampant” and that “it goes on unchecked and uncontrolled”.

The industry “is controlled by a group of male actors, producers, distributors, exhibitors and directors who have gained enormous fame and wealth” and they were among the perpetrators, it added.

“Men in industry make open demands for sex without any qualms as if it’s their birthright. Women are left with very little options but to oblige – or reject at the cost of their long awaited dream of pursuing cinema as their profession.

“The experiences of many women are really shocking and of such gravity that they have not disclosed the details even to their close family members.”

Many of the people the panel approached were initially reluctant to speak because “they were afraid they would lose their jobs”.

“In the beginning, we found their fear strange but as our study progressed we realised it was well-founded. We are concerned about their and their close relatives’ safety.”

The report, the WCC says, has vindicated its stand. “For years, we have been saying that there is a systemic problem in the industry. Sexual harassment is just one of them. This report proves it,” Beena Paul, an award-winning editor and one of the founding members of the WCC, told the BBC.

“We were always told that we were troublemakers [for raising such issues]. This report proves that it [the condition] is far worse than what even we thought,” she said.

Members of the WCC say they have faced difficulty in getting work since they began demanding better working conditions on film sets. “People don’t like the fact that we are asking questions. So, quite a few members have faced difficult situations,” Ms Paul says.

The Association of Malayalam Movie Artists (AMMA), a top industry body which counts superstars like Mohanlal and Mamooty among its members, denied the accusations. Its general secretary Siddique disagreed that there was a small, powerful group that controlled the industry.

He also denied that sexual harassment was rampant in the industry and said that most of the complaints they received were about the delay or a lack of payment for workers. He said conditions for women had improved on film sets in the past five years and all facilities were now available to them.

In the week since its release, the report has created ripples in the state, with activists and prominent opposition leaders demanding action against those accused of wrongdoing.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said if any woman who testified before the committee came forward to file a complaint, the government would take action. “No matter how big they are, they will be brought before the law,” he said.

On Thursday, a public interest petition was filed in the Kerala High Court, seeking initiation of criminal proceedings against those accused in the report.

The court ordered the government to submit a copy of the report and the judges said they would decide if criminal action needed to be taken once they had read it.

Allegations of harassment and abuse in films are not new in India – in 2018, the #MeToo movement hit the country’s most popular film industry Bollywood after actress Tanushree Dutta accused veteran actor Nana Patekar of behaving inappropriately towards her on a film set in 2008. Patekar denied the allegations.

Ms Dutta, who has since claimed that she has been denied work, described the Hema committee report as “useless”, adding that earlier reports about making workplaces safer for women had not helped.

Parvathy Thiruvothu, an award-winning actress and a key member of the WCC, however, told Asianet news channel that she considered the release of the report “a victory”.

“It’s opened up a door for big changes within the industry,” she said.

Jeo Baby, director of The Great Indian Kitchen, a critically-acclaimed film that examines the patriarchal structure within the family, told the BBC that while gender issues remain a concern, change is under way in the industry. “This is the right time to correct this. The film industry has to fight this together.”

The report, which has made several recommendations to make the industry a safe place for women, says their inquiry and recommendations are not to find fault with any individual, but “an earnest attempt to ennoble a profession so that it becomes a viable career option for aspiring artists and technicians, both male and female”.

“Hopefully filmmaking will become so safe that parents can send their daughters and sons to the profession with the same confidence and sense of security as they send their children to an engineering firm or a college,” it adds.

Read more:

• India arrests after actress says she was abducted and raped
• Bhavana Menon breaks silence on sexual assault
• #MeToo: Why sexual harassment is a reality in Bollywood
• Sex harassment claims shake top India dance academy

While the US and Russia were busy finalising the biggest exchange of prisoners since the Cold War, a gifted but little-known Russian pianist was dying in silence in jail.

Pavel Kushnir had protested repeatedly against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and began a hunger strike soon after his arrest in May, later refusing water too.

He died, slowly and without publicity, on 28 July – four days before a group of better-known dissidents were swapped for Kremlin spies, sleeper agents and killers imprisoned in the West.

After his lonely death, at a pre-trial detention centre in Birobidzhan in Russia’s Far East, the 39-year-old was mourned by only 11 people at his cremation.

Svetlana Kaverzina, an independent politician in Siberia, said no-one had tried to talk him out of sacrificing himself because they hadn’t been aware what was happening.

“We couldn’t chip in and send him a lawyer – we didn’t know,” she wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “He was alone.”

The YouTube channel where Kushnir published four anti-war videos had only five subscribers when he was arrested.

His “Foreign Agent Mulder” posts were a reference to a character in the US TV series, the X Files, which was popular in Russia in the 1990s, and also to a Russian law that allows people considered politically suspect to be declared “foreign agents”. In one clip Kushnir even appears with a hand-drawn FBI badge.

His final film, released in January, addressed the 2022 massacre of civilians by Russian troops in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv.

A few months later, a Telegram channel close to the secret services, Operational Reports, posted a video showing masked men leading Kushnir into a white minivan.

It added that a criminal case had been opened, accusing him of making a public call to engage in terrorist activity, which is punishable by up to seven years in jail.

Nothing more was heard until 2 August, when the human rights activist Olga Romanova and the pianist’s friend, Olga Shkrygunova, revealed his death in an article published by online news organisation Vot Tak.

His 79-year-old mother, Irina Levina, later confirmed her son had died.

Kushnir was born in Tambov, central Russia, where his father Mikhail was a pianist and educator, and his mother a music school teacher.

He started playing piano at the age of two and, at just 17, gave a remarkable two-and-a-half-hour concert featuring the 24 preludes and fugues by composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Later that year, he was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory, where classmate Julia Wertman says he cultivated a “dissident image”, often wearing a shabby coat and black clothes, with a half-litre bottle of vodka sticking out of a pocket.

Asked in a 2005 interview what composition he would never perform, he replied: “The Russian national anthem.”

After graduation, Shkrygunova says Kushnir deliberately took jobs in smaller cities, believing he would have more musical and personal freedom outside Moscow.

He moved to Yekaterinburg, then Kursk, and spent three years in Kurgan, a city to the east of the Ural mountains, before he lost his job at the philharmonic orchestra there in 2022.

Shkrygunova does not know exactly why he was dismissed, but adds: “This was a cog that didn’t fit any machine, and it had been that way since his childhood.”

After four months without a job, he became a soloist with the Birobidzhan Philharmonic, telling local television: “If I’m not imprisoned, drafted into the army, or fired, then I hope to spend the next 12 years with you.”

Kushnir spent his free time protesting against the war.

In emails to friends he described sticking posters around Birobidzhan at night, with slogans angrily denouncing the draft, and describing Vladimir Putin as a fascist.

He also began staging hunger strikes: first for 20 days in the spring of 2023, then for three months later that year.

Shkrygunova says Kushnir knew the danger he was putting himself in.

“It was his solitary protest,” she says. “An act by someone who didn’t know what else he could do.”

She tried to convince him to leave Russia, or at least to perform in Berlin, where she now lives. But they never managed to arrange the trip.

In late March, Kushnir spoke to Shkrygunova for the last time, telling her he felt like he was being watched and that he “kept seeing the same person”.

“Whatever happens, happens: I’m doing this for a reason,” he added.

Birobidzhan City Court records contain no information about a criminal case against him, though there is a record of a non-criminal case of “petty hooliganism” submitted on 20 June.

On 19 July, Kushnir was fined an unknown amount, but it is unclear whether he attended the hearing.

The court then sent him a copy of the verdict, but it was returned on 30 July with the note “not possible to deliver”.

By then, of course, Kushnir was already dead.

The independent news site, Mediazona, spoke to someone who saw him shortly before he died.

They described him as “like a skeleton”, who by mid-July could barely walk and was “in very poor condition”.

The official cause of death was “dilated cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure”.

The FSB and the Birobidzhan Court did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment. The regional head of Russia’s prison service, Vasily Mikhaylenko, told Mediazona he knew nothing about the case.

After Kushnir’s death, his mother told another independent news organisation, Okno, that she had tried and failed to influence her son.

“I certainly wanted him to conduct himself in a quieter way and stay out of politics altogether.

“I am very sorry that he gave up his life, apparently for nothing at all.”

But Shkrygunova disagrees, saying that Kushnir knew all along that he was risking his life so that he could express his anti-war views.

“He understood there might have been another way,” Shkrygunova adds.

“But by the time he had realised it, there was no turning back. He knew he was going to go all the way – so it wouldn’t turn out to be a wasted effort.”

In death, Kushnir has attracted more attention than he ever received in his lifetime.

A book he wrote in 2014 has quickly been republished in Germany.

Grace Chatto, a member of Grammy-award-winning electronic music group Clean Bandit who studied with Kushnir at the Moscow Conservatory, wrote an emotional tribute on Instagram to her “gentle and funny” friend.

And 22 leading classical musicians including Daniel Barenboim, Sir Simon Rattle and Martha Argerich wrote an open letter to remember a “remarkable artist” they had never met.

Although Kushnir’s YouTube channel had single-figure subscribers in his lifetime, his most popular clip has now been viewed more than 22,000 times.

Italian authorities investigating the deaths of seven people in the sinking of a luxury yacht in Sicily say they are looking into potential crimes of “shipwreck and manslaughter”.

They stressed, however, that the investigation was in its initial stages and they were not currently looking at anyone specifically.

UK tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah were among those who died when the Bayesian went down off the coast of Porticello during a storm in the early hours of Monday morning.

It was previously believed the vessel may have sunk because of a waterspout, but the authorities now say the most likely cause was a localised, powerful wind known as a downburst.

The bodies of Jonathan Bloomer, a Morgan Stanley International bank chairman, his wife Judy Bloomer, Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo, and his wife Neda Morvillo were also recovered from the wreckage some 50m (164 ft) down, after days of deep dive searches with little visibility.

The body of Canadian-Antiguan national Recaldo Thomas, who was working as a chef on the superyacht, was recovered at the scene on Monday.

Post-mortems are set to be conducted.

The remaining 15 people who were on board the luxury yacht were rescued.

• ‘For two seconds I lost my baby in the sea’ – Sicily yacht survivor
• Friend remembers ‘genius’ and ‘genuine’ Mike Lynch
• Our church is in shock over yacht couple – vicar

In a press conference on Saturday morning, Ambrogio Cartosio, chief prosecutor of the nearby town of Termini Imerese, said the coastguard had been called at 04:38 local time on Monday but the yacht had already sunk by the time crews had arrived.

Mr Cartosio told journalists he thought it was “probable that offences were committed” surrounding the sinking of the yacht.

He said they will ascertain whether the captain, crew, individuals in charge of supervision, the ship-builder, or others could bear responsibility.

“We will establish each element’s responsibility – that will be done by the inquiry, so we can’t do that prematurely,” he said.

“For me, it is probable that offences were committed – that it could be a case of manslaughter – but we can only establish that if you give us the time to investigate.”

Raffaele Macauda, deputy commander of the Palermo coastguard, said the weather at the time of the yacht’s sinking was abnormal, adding there were forecasts of winds and a storm alert.

There was no alert of a tornado, the deputy commander said.

Mr Macauda said: “Given that the conditions were such, there wasn’t anything to suggest there could be an extreme situation arising.

“There are vessels that can monitor, after all, these events and one would have thought that the captain had taken precautions.”

Deputy Prosecutor Raffaele Cammarano told journalists the Italian Air Force had confirmed the sinking was most likely caused by a downburst.

A downburst is a localised, powerful wind that descends from a thunderstorm, spreading out rapidly upon hitting the ground.

Girolamo Bentivoglio Fiandra from Palermo’s fire brigade said the Bayesian sank stern-first and then rolled onto its right side.

He explained that as a result, the victims then sought refuge in cabins on the left side of the vessel where “the last air bubbles formed”.

Local officials said they are looking into why some people on board were able to flee the vessel and others were not.

Speaking on behalf of the divers, Mr Fiandra said about 70 people were involved in an “intense” search operation each day, with 123 dives undertaken in total.

“We were operating at 50 metres depth and … there was very little visibility due to the weather conditions,” he said.

One of the divers involved in the operation told the media it was “difficult” getting into the yacht’s cabins and it required “very lengthy periods to remove obstacles” through them.

Mr Macauda said the coastguard is conducting in-depth environmental monitoring.

He adds that the owner of the Bayesian has expressed an interest in recovering the vessel from the sea floor, but the timing of this was uncertain.

Some experts have estimated it could take eight weeks to recover the yacht.

An official said the Italian authorities did not have the “exact information” about the yacht’s black box – a device that can record data including a ship’s position, speed, radar information, and sometimes audio.

Passengers on board the yacht were understood to have been celebrating Mr Lynch’s acquittal in a US fraud case.

The businessman, who founded software giant Autonomy in 1996, was cleared in June of carrying out fraud relating to its $11bn (£8.64bn) sale to US company Hewlett Packard.

Andrew Kanter, a close friend to Mr Lynch, said he was the “most brilliant” and “carrying person I have ever known”.

Meanwhile, friends of his daughter, Hannah, have described the 18-year-old as a “warm and beautiful soul”, while teachers have praised her “sky-high intellectual ability”.

In a statement, the Bloomer family described Jonathan and Judy Bloomer as “incredible people and an inspiration to many”.

“Our only comfort is that they are still together now,” the statement said.

If brat described our wild and unapologetically messy summers, then exemplary manners, politeness and being a stickler for rules is what’s taking us into autumn.

In recent weeks, thousands of videos showing us how to refine our etiquette have popped up on TikTok, all off the back of the “very demure, very mindful” trend.

The satirical idea started out as poking fun at the stereotypical ideas of femininity, but it has since taken on a life of its own.

While half of the internet are using the phrase ironically, others are concerned that the trend is just another way of setting unrealistic standards for women.

So, is anyone actually trying to be demure, or is this just a massive in-joke that’s been blown out of proportion?

The seemingly harmless catchphrase was coined by content creator Jools Lebron, who posted a TikTok earlier this month on her demure work outfit and mindful make-up.

“You see how I do my make-up for work? Very demure, very mindful,” she told her millions of followers.

“A lot of you girls go to the interview looking like Marge Simpson and go to the job looking like Patty and Selma. Not demure.”

She also reminds us that when dressing for the office, her shirt “only has a little chi-chi out, not my cho-cho”, adding: “You should never “come to work with a green cut crease”.

After achieving overnight fame with her videos, the internet sensation has quit her checkout job, appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and updated fans that she’s now able to finance her gender transition.

Not only have content creators and celebrities been jumping on the trend, but even companies like Nasa have joined the bandwagon.

“You see how Earth looks in space? It’s very demure, very mindful. Earth looks very cutesy in the solar system,” the space agency posted on X.

Lebron has explained that her motto is “obviously a joke” and while the definition of being demure means to be “reserved, modest, and shy”, she isn’t here to promote a Bridgerton-esque lifestyle for women.

Most content creators have been mocking the trend by subtly joking about how to be demure while being totally extravagant.

For example, RuPaul explains how he reads a book in a considerate way, while Penn Badgley, who plays Joe Goldberg in Netflix’s You, posted a TikTok saying: “playing a romantic icon for five seasons, I’m very modest, I’m very mindful.”

Demure has also made its way into our fashion – content creator Ambika Dhir says being “demure and mindful in outfits is about well-crafted quiet luxury, chic outfits and a strong personal style that grabs attention without being shouty”.

Similarly, Isa Lavahun, a social media strategist, says she interprets Lebron’s demure catchphrase as the “embodiment of subtle self-love – knowing that as long as you carry yourself with grace and empathy, no other opinion matters”.

But, not everyone sees it like that.

One Tik Toker, Sabrina Thulander, says she’s “always interpreted demure as a negative thing, like how a Victorian era man wants his wife to act. It all feels very trad wife to me”.

But some women have been leaning into the trad wife trend, which has risen in popularity due to the artistic portrayal of women in shows like Bridgerton and Downtown Abbey who are demure and mindful.

Author Gershom Mabaquiao explains that the trend started off being about “the unseriousness of self-presentation”, but since it has become bigger than social media and permeated society, it’s being interpreted in a “very literal way”.

The fact some people are posting about being demure, cutesty and mindful in a serious way shows “how nuances are lost when messages travel from the high-context in-groups to the low-context outgroups”, he says.

“The sarcasm and deliberate ‘double standards’ of the joke has gotten lost.”

Nöel Wolf, a cultural and linguistic expert, says the word demure dates back to the 1600s, and was used a lot in the 1800s to describe young women who were modest and reserved”.

The recontextualisation of the word now shows “how old language can take on a new life in the hands of the younger generations”.

As TikTok trends come and go at an increasingly rapid pace, it’s hard to know which word or phrase will be the next big thing.

A former English teacher and now content creator who goes by the name of ExemplaryPotato, shares new words every week on the platform.

In response to demure, he has shared a video explaining the meaning of vituperative, an antonym to demure.

Wolf says the phrases that Gen Z have used this year are unexpected and obscure, like raw dogging, rizz and bed rotting.

He added that demure isn’t the “only archaic word making a comeback this year” as Inside Out 2 brought “ennui” back into fashion, while Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department re-popularised the word “tryst”.

“There’s a tendency for online trends to yo-yo: we moved from the clean girl aesthetic to brat summer as a rejection of that, and now to “demure”, so, there’s a good chance that whatever the next trend is, it’ll be far from demure.”

At least 14 people have died after a bus carrying passengers from India fell into a river in Nepal, officials have said.

There were around 40 people on the bus, which was travelling to Nepal’s capital Kathmandu from Pokhara, according to reports.

Rescue operations are underway at the accident site on the bank of the Marsyangdi river in Tanahun district.

The cause of the accident and the identities of the victims have not been confirmed yet.

“The bus bearing number plate UP FT 7623 plunged into the river and is lying on the bank of the river,” news agency ANI quoted Deepkumar Raya, a senior police official from Tanahun, as saying. The vehicle is registered in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis of the western state of Maharashtra said that some of the victims were from the state.

“We are in touch with the Uttar Pradesh government to bring the bodies of the deceased to Maharashtra in coordination with the Nepal government,” he posted on X (formerly Twitter).

Videos from the accident site show the mangled remains of the bus lying at the bottom of a hilly slope, next to a gushing river. Rescue personnel can be seen looking for survivors among the wreckage.

A Nepal army helicopter carrying a medical team has been despatched to the accident site.

The bus route from Pokhara to Kathmandu is very popular among Indian tourists and pilgrims.

Accidents are often reported in Nepal, due to factors including poor maintenance of roads and vehicles and narrow paths in mountainous areas.

In July, dozens of people went missing after a landslide swept two passenger buses into the Trishuli river.

Twenty years ago, your music collection consisted of whatever CDs or records you could cram into your bedroom.

Now, anyone with an internet connection has access to more music than they could listen to in one lifetime.

In October 2022, Apple Music boasted its catalogue had reached 100 million songs. Since then, an average of 120,000 new songs have been uploaded every day, making the current total around 176 million tracks.

But here’s the thing: There are still huge gaps.

You can’t stream Ray Charles’ 1977 album True To Life.

Charli XCX’s debut single, !Franchesckaar! has been swallowed by the digital void.

Most important of all, there’s no way to hear 1993’s Christmas number one: Mr Blobby by Mr Blobby.

In fact, one survey by the US Library of Congress suggested that less than 20% of all recorded music was available on the internet.

Sometimes, those recordings are tied up in complex contractual agreements. De La Soul spent two decades clearing the samples on their landmark debut album, 3 Feet High And Rising, before it finally arrived on streaming services last year.

But hundreds of other songs have simply been forgotten.

That’s where Rob Johnson comes in.

By day, he’s a 41-year-old working in business development for a London law firm. By night, he’s a music industry crusader – digging up obscure gems and persuading record labels to make them available online.

Over the last six years, he’s been responsible for 725 releases, including tracks by Sting, Cher and Annie Lennox, with a strong bias for late 90s pop acts such as Billie Piper, S Club and A*Teens.

“I’ll admit it’s a very strange thing to do, but it gives people a lot of happiness so why not?” he tells the BBC.

It all started in 2016, when he helped his friend Jan Johnston – a trance vocalist who’s worked with Paul Oakenfold – to get her catalogue online.

“A lot of her solo music wasn’t out there, simply because it was never a massive hit for the labels,” he recalls.

“So I said to her, ‘OK, this is a hare-brained scheme, but why don’t we contact them and ask them a) do you still own it and b) can you release it?’”

With no industry experience, Johnson simply called the switchboards of the UK’s biggest record companies.

“I hate talking to strangers on the phone, but eventually I got through to the right people and they were like, ‘Yes, we’ll happily put that out’.”

In passing, he suggested to Warner Records that they upload some of Louise Redknapp’s old albums, to capitalise on her appearance on Strictly Come Dancing.

“Good spot,” was the reply.

That’s when he realised this could become a full-time hobby.

“I had a little bit of momentum, so I got bullish and thought, ‘Why don’t I just ask them to release more?’”

To convince the labels, he had to prove there was a demand – so he set up a Twitter account where fans could make requests, calling it Pop Music Activism.

Almost immediately, he was flooded with messages about Victoria Beckham’s debut single, Out Of Your Mind.

“It was slated at the time, but a lot of pop fans looked back retrospectively and thought, ‘That was a bit of a fun bop’,” says Johnson.

After a few calls, he got it uploaded in June 2018, since when it’s amassed 1.8 million streams on Spotify alone.

“The reaction was quite fun,” he says. “You know how gays can be over the top? They were like ‘Oh my God, this has saved my life!’

“And it happened during Pride month, which was a nice little cherry on the cake.”

Rescuing songs takes a lot of work. Contracts have to be checked, original recordings have to be sourced, and streaming services require reams of metadata.

But when it works, artists are thrilled.

“Rob’s incredible. What he’s done for me, I would do anything for him,” says Maria Nayler.

Known for singing Robert Miles’ 1996 hit One And One, Nayler’s story is a classic tale of music industry misogyny.

After singing on dozens of trance anthems in the 1990s, she was signed to Kylie’s then-label, DeConstruction Records. But when the company found out she was pregnant, it scrapped her debut album.

“They went, ‘We’re not releasing any records while you’re pregnant. It’s gone on the shelf until the baby’s born.’

“Then, of course, nine months down the line, nothing happened.

“In this day and age, they would all be slaughtered, but in the 1990s I just accepted it.”

Johnson was a fan of Nayler’s single Naked and Sacred, and contacted her in 2018 to ask if she wanted help liberating her unreleased material.

“I was a bit like, ‘Who is this guy?’,” she laughs, “but he knew more about my music than I did.”

It was a tough project. DeConstruction had been bought by BMG, then acquired by Sony, and eventually closed down. No-one was sure who owned Nayler’s master tapes.

“It was a nightmare,” she says. “No-one wanted to talk to Rob.”

Out of options, they sent a blanket email to 75 people at Sony. Within two minutes, the archive team replied and agreed to track down the music.

Nayler’s album, She, was finally released in January 2023. Next month, she goes on tour with dance producer Robert Gillies, who has remixed Naked & Sacred for his next single.

“After all these years and all that hard work, I just feel really, really happy,” she says.

It’s a similar story for Alexis Strum, who was signed and dropped by two major record labels in the early 2000s.

She was left with two fully-completed albums, recorded at a cost of £500,000, that were never released.

“Emotionally, it was huge,” she says. “It’s like having a painting that no-one’s ever seen, or a book that no-one’s ever been allowed to read.”

Some of her unreleased songs were recorded by Kylie Minogue and Rachel Stevens, but a small group of dedicated fans clamoured for the originals.

“Rob told me people had been exchanging my demo CDs on eBay,” she says. “I didn’t even know anyone knew about me!”

With his help, Warner and Universal not only handed over Strum’s masters, but agreed to write off her debts.

Her most popular song Cocoon recently hit 500,000 streams (“half a million more than Universal thought it was going to have”) and, when we speak, she’s back in the studio.

“I’m a mum and I’ve been working in IT, so it’s really weird to be like, ‘I’m going to be a pop star’ again.

“It feels so ridiculous that it’s actually plausible.”

One person who’d rather forget their debut album, however, is Adam Rickitt.

The former Coronation Street actor signed a six-album deal with Polydor in 1999, hoping to become the UK’s next teen idol.

“Let’s be honest, I had very little control over the creative side of it,” he laughs.

“They knew what audience I was targeting, and it was the gay audience, the pink pound, and young teenage girls.”

His first single, I Breathe Again, was a massive hit, thanks mainly to a video where he appears completely in the buff, but when subsequent songs missed the top 10, both Polydor and Rickitt lost interest.

His album, Good Time, stalled at number 41 and was, for years, unavailable online.

“I totally understand why I would have slipped through the net,” he laughs. “It’s not exactly like Burt Bacharach disappearing off the face of the earth.”

Unaware of Johnson’s campaign to get the album resurrected, Rickitt was bemused when it sprung back to life in 2018.

“The album period wasn’t my favourite but if people still like it and find it fun, that’s cool. I’m happy with being the retro kitsch guy,” he says.

“But taking me out of the equation, I do think it’s a shame that the record labels can decide what songs people can or can’t listen to.”

Johnson says there’s nothing sinister about these decisions. Catalogue teams with limited resources are obviously going to gravitate towards proven hit songs.

Still, there are blind spots. For a long time, NSync’s single Girlfriend was “greyed out” on Spotify – with the label apparently unaware that the freely-available album version wasn’t the same as the hit remix with Nelly and the Neptunes.

“I picked that one up with Sony US and now that’s getting millions of streams,” says Johnson

It takes a fan to spot these things. And Johnson, who devotes “two to four hours a week” to his project, has just the right mix of passion and affability to nudge labels in the right direction.

“It makes fans happy and it gives artists a sense of closure,” he says, “but it’s also a way of cataloguing music for history.

“Whatever is on Spotify now will migrate onto the services we’ll be using in 10 years, whether that’s a chip in our head, or whatever.”

Investigators examining the sinking of a luxury yacht off the coast of Sicily have outlined what they know six days on.

Seven people died when the Bayesian, a 56-metre sailing boat, sank to the bottom of the ocean during bad weather early on 19 August.

There were 22 passengers and crew on board, 15 of whom managed to escape onto a lifeboat.

In their first press conference about the tragedy, at a court in Termini Imerese, Sicily, on Saturday, Italian prosecutors confirmed that a manslaughter and negligent shipwreck investigation has begun over the disaster’s seven deaths.

Officials were unable to answer a number of queries from the media, saying they needed time to establish the facts, but they did shine a light on some previously unknown details.

A manslaughter investigation has been opened into the deaths of seven people in the sinking.

British tech businessman Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah lost their lives, alongside Morgan Stanley International bank chairman Jonathan Bloomer, his wife Judy Bloomer, Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda Morvillo, and Canadian-Antiguan national Recaldo Thomas, who was working as a chef on the yacht.

All of their bodies have now been recovered.

Chief prosecutor of Termini Imerese, Ambrogio Cartosio, said his office has opened an initial investigation into manslaughter and negligent shipwreck.

He told reporters they would ascertain whether the captain, crew, individuals in charge of supervision, the ship-builder, or others could bear responsibility.

He added: “We will establish each element’s responsibility – that will be done by the inquiry, so we can’t do that prematurely.

“For me, it is probable that offences were committed – that it could be a case of manslaughter – but we can only establish that if you give us the time to investigate.

“Media timing is completely different from that of a prosecutor. We need a minimum amount of time to come to a proper scientific conclusion.”

The inquiry is currently an Italian investigation with local involvement, but Mr Cartosio said: “I cannot tell you with any certainty that the inquiry will be exclusively Italian.

“There will be developments, I’m sure, on that score.”

Witnesses described seeing a waterspout form during the storm before the sinking of the Bayesian yacht, which is similar to a tornado over a body of water.

However, deputy prosecutor Raffaele Cammarano told the press conference that “from the information we have, it is a downburst we are talking about”.

BBC Weather forecaster Ben Rich said a downburst occurs when air races downward from the base of a cloud. It produces a powerful gust of wind that blows unpredictably outwards in different directions.

He said it can be confused with tornadoes or waterspouts because the damage caused can be similar.

Maritime director of western Sicily, Rear Admiral Raffaele Macauda, said the weather at the time of the yacht’s sinking was abnormal and there was nothing to suggest such an extreme situation would arise.

He told the press conference there was no tornado alert.

Officials said they would be looking at how a downburst could have affected the Bayesian and not other vessels nearby.

The body of Recaldo Thomas, who was working as a chef on the yacht, was found outside of the vessel and was the first to be discovered.

The bodies of the remaining six people were recovered from cabins on the left side of the yacht after it had sunk, the chief of the Palermo fire service said.

Girolamo Bentivoglio said that specialised divers attempting to retrieve the bodies had to deal with “very little visibility due to the weather conditions” and were called in from across the country as part of a search-and-rescue operation which involved “some 70 people” each day.

He added: “The yacht obviously pinned to the right and obviously the [people] tried to go on the other side and then took refuge in their cabins.

“We found four or five bodies in the cabin on the left and there was another one in the third cabin on the left too, and they were in the higher part of the wreck.”

Mr Cammarano suggested that passengers may not have been able to escape from the yacht because they were asleep.

Asked why they were not woken up or alerted, he said: “That is precisely what we are trying to ascertain from the statements made during the interrogation of the survivors – an essential point in the inquiry, obviously.”

He said several of the bodies were found in a single cabin.

He said: “The bodies were found in a cabin which was not theirs, but this doesn’t give us any kind of certainty about what happened.

“We have no idea of the reasons for their all being found in the same cabin.”

Prosecutors were questioned about the captain of the Bayesian and its crew.

Asked whether the crew will remain in Sicily, Mr Cartosio said: “There’s no obligation, but they should be available for the investigation.”

The press conference heard authorities still have questions to ask the captain but that they cannot keep people in the country under Italian law.

Mr Cammarano was asked about the crew undergoing alcohol and drug testing, and he said officials were trying to conduct those tests.

When asked how it was possible that most of the crew managed to survive, he said the incident happened suddenly and the inquiry will look into it.

No information has yet been gleaned from an examination of the seven people who died, prosecutors said.

In response to a question about whether post-mortem examinations have been carried out, Mr Cammarano said: “There are a whole number of preliminary stages to go through before the autopsies.”

Earlier this week, on live television, the mother of one of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza made an offer to the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar: Release all 109 hostages – dead and alive – in exchange for the children of Israel’s security chiefs.

But Ditza Or, whose son Avinatan was kidnapped from the Nova music festival during the 7 October attacks, wasn’t pushing for Israel’s leaders to sign a ceasefire deal – she was pushing them to fight Hamas harder.

Ms Or, and a handful of other pro-war hostage families, are unlikely allies of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is now under immense pressure from his US ally, his security chiefs and even his own defence minister to be more flexible and reach a deal.

Leaked reports of a recent phone call with his most important ally suggested that US President Joe Biden told the Israeli leader at one point to “stop bullshitting” him. The implication: that Mr Netanyahu didn’t want a deal at all.

As negotiations limped on in Cairo this week, aimed at bridging the gaps between Israel and Hamas, leaks to Israeli media suggest that the gaps between Mr Netanyahu and his own negotiators and defence chiefs are getting wider.

According to Dana Weiss, chief political analyst for Israel’s TV Channel 12, the prime minister privately accused key negotiators and security chiefs of “weakness”, presenting himself as standing alone in defence of Israel’s security interests.

They have different approaches to the urgency of a deal, she says, and one reason for that is the differing level of responsibility each feels.

“The military establishment feel guilty about 7 October, and feel a moral duty to bring back the hostages,” she explained. “Our government, our ministers and especially Prime Minister Netanyahu don’t feel personally responsible for 7 October, they put the blame totally on the military establishment, and therefore do not feel that same sense of urgency to go ahead with a deal.”

Mr Netanyahu has said that getting the hostages home is his second priority in the war – behind victory over Hamas, and has emphasised his commitment to preserve Israel’s security “in the face of major domestic and foreign pressure”.

The man who once cherished his image as Israel’s ‘Mr Security’ appears to be playing to it again, 10 months after that image was shattered by the 7 October attacks.

A key sticking point in negotiations is whether Israeli forces withdraw from a strip of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt, known as the Philadelphi Corridor.

Mr Netanyahu appears to be sticking hard to a “red line” of keeping an Israeli military presence there, citing Israel’s security needs, despite leaks suggesting that his negotiators believe it is a “deal-breaker”.

Senior Hamas figure Hussam Badran told the BBC on Friday that the group would accept nothing less than the withdrawal of Israeli forces, and that Mr Netanyahu’s position showed that he did not want an agreement, but was “manipulat[ing] through empty rounds of negotiations to gain time”.

Hamas is widely seen as facing tough questions over what Gaza or the Palestinians have gained from the October attacks, after more than 10 months of bombing and displacement.

Compromises on prisoner exchanges are seen as easier for the group to swallow than accepting the continued presence of Israel’s army in Gaza, and checkpoints for residents moving north.

Egypt is also understood to be refusing any deal that does not have Palestinians in charge on the other side of their shared border.

Hamas has not formally joined the current round of talks, and many believe Mr Sinwar’s own priority is keeping the Gaza War going in order to spark a regional conflict, which would put enormous pressure on Israel, and – the reasoning goes -force its prime minister into greater concessions to end it.

The risks of a wider escalation – amid threats from Iran and Hezbollah – are one reason Washington is pressing hard for a deal. The US is three months away from a presidential election, and President Biden’s administration believes a ceasefire in Gaza would help calm the region.

The political analyst, Dana Weiss, says that Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant agrees that if Israel does not take the path of a ceasefire deal – even temporarily – then it will be on a sure path to escalation.

“For the prime minister, it’s totally the opposite,” she says. “He answers: No, if we go ahead and cave to Sinwar now, Hezbollah and Iran see that we’re weak. We have to finish the task with Hamas, to prevent the war.”

But, she says, Mr Netanyahu also has domestic political incentives to stall the negotiations. Among those incentives is the fact that, after months of abysmal approval ratings, he is now rising again in opinion polls.

Several surveys have recently placed him at the top of respondents’ voting intentions, both in terms of his right-wing party, Likud, and his own personal profile as leader – results that were unthinkable a few months ago.

All eyes are now on the next scheduled talks, due to take place on Sunday. In the meantime, Egypt has reportedly agreed to share Israel’s latest proposal for the border area with Hamas.

Mediators insist a deal is still possible, but hopes on all sides appear to be shrinking.

After meeting the Israeli prime minister today, Ella Ben Ami, the daughter of another Israeli hostage, said she looked Benjamin Netanyahu in the eye and asked him to promise to do everything and not give up until they return.

She was left, she said, with “a heavy and difficult feeling that this isn’t going to happen soon”.

The clock is ticking on these negotiations: for Gaza’s people, for the Israeli hostages still held there in tunnels, for the region as a whole.

But for Mr Sinwar and Mr Netanyahu, perhaps the most powerful weapon they have in this war is time.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in Ukraine to hold talks with President Volodymyr Zelensky. The trip comes just weeks after he met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

The visit is significant because Kyiv and some Western capitals had reacted sharply to Mr Modi’s visit to the Russian capital in July.

Mr Zelensky was particularly critical, saying he was “disappointed to see the leader of the world’s largest democracy hug the world’s most bloody criminal in Moscow”.

So, is Mr Modi visiting Kyiv to placate Mr Zelensky and other Western leaders?

Not entirely.

It’s not surprising to see India balance its relations between two competing nations or blocs. The country’s famed non-alignment approach to geopolitics has served it well for decades.

Friday’s visit – the first by an Indian prime minister to Ukraine – is more about signalling that while India will continue to have strong relations with Russia, it will still work closely with the West.

Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Centre think-tank in Washington, says the trip will further reassert India’s strategic autonomy.

“India isn’t in the business of placating Western powers, or anyone for that matter. It’s a trip meant to advance Indian interests, by reasserting friendship with Kyiv and conveying its concerns about the continuing war,” he says.

However, the timing of the visit does reflect that Indian diplomats have taken onboard the sharp reactions from the US to Mr Modi’s Moscow visit.

India has refrained from directly criticising Russia over the war, much to the annoyance of Western powers.

• Modi’s balancing act as he meets Putin in Moscow

Delhi, however, has often spoken about the importance of respecting territorial integrity and sovereignty of nations. It has continuously pushed for diplomacy and dialogue to end the war.

Mr Modi’s Moscow visit in July came hours after Russian bombing killed at least 41 people in Ukraine, including at a children’s hospital in Kyiv, sparking a global outcry.

The Indian PM said the death of children was painful and terrifying but stopped short of blaming Russia.

Mr Modi is not likely to deviate from this stance during his visit to Kyiv. The US and other Western nations have grown to accept Delhi’s stand, given India’s time-tested relationship with Moscow and its reliance on Russian military equipment.

India, the world’s largest importer of arms, has diversified its defence import portfolio and also grown domestic manufacturing in recent years but it still buys more than 50% of its defence equipment from Russia.

India has also increased its oil imports from Russia, taking advantage of cheaper prices offered by Moscow – Russia was the top oil supplier to India last year.

The US and its allies have often implored India to take a clearer stand on the war but they have also refrained from applying harsh sanctions or pressure.

The West also sees India as a counterbalance to China and doesn’t want to upset that dynamic. India, now the fifth largest economy in the world, is also a growing market for business.

Mr Kugelman says the West will welcome the visit and see it as Delhi’s willingness to engage with all sides.

“Mr Modi has a strong incentive to signal that it’s not leaning so close to Moscow that there’s nothing to salvage with Kyiv,” he says.

This is important because India wants to keep growing its relations with the West, particularly with the US, and wouldn’t want to upset the momentum. Eric Garcetti, the US ambassador to India, recently said the relationship should not be “taken for granted”.

India also needs the West as China, its Asian rival, and Russia have forged close ties in recent years.

While Delhi has long viewed Moscow as a power that can put pressure on an assertive China when needed, it can’t be taken for granted.

Meanwhile, many media commentators have spoken about the possibility of Mr Modi positioning himself as a peacemaker, given India’s close relations with both Moscow and the West.

But it’s unlikely that he will turn up with a peace plan.

“Is India really up to it, and are the conditions right? India doesn’t like other countries trying to mediate in its own issues, chief among them Kashmir. And I don’t think Mr Modi would formally offer mediation unless both Russia and Ukraine want it. And at this point, I don’t think they do,” Mr Kugelman adds.

Ukraine, however, will still welcome Mr Modi’s visit and see it as an opportunity to engage with a close ally of Moscow, something it hasn’t done much since the war began.

Mr Zelensky, though, is unlikely to hold back his criticism of Mr Putin in front of the Indian PM. Mr Modi can live with that as he has faced such situations many times in other Western capitals.

Moscow is not likely to react to the visit as it has also been making concessions for Delhi’s multilateral approach to geopolitics.

But beyond reasserting its non-alignment policy, Delhi also has bigger goals from this visit.

India has been ramping up engagement with Europe in the past decade, particularly with the underserved regions in Central and Eastern Europe.

Delhi wants to keep consolidating its relations with the big four – the UK, Italy, Germany and France – but also wants to boost engagement with other countries in Europe.

Mr Modi is also visiting Poland on this trip – the first Indian PM to visit the country in 45 years. He also became the first Indian prime minister to visit Austria in 41 years in July.

Analysts say that this signals India’s growing understanding that Central European nations will play a bigger role in geopolitics in the future and strong relations with them will serve Delhi well.

The Indian government has also revived trade deal negotiations with Europe. It has signed a trade and investment deal with the European Free Trade Association, which is the intergovernmental organisation of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

So, while there will be a lot of focus on the war during his visit, Indian diplomats are likely to stay focused on the bigger goal.

“Central and Eastern Europe now have greater agency in writing their own destiny and reshaping regional geopolitics. Mr Modi’s visit to Warsaw and Kyiv is about recognising that momentous change at the heart of Europe and deepening bilateral political, economic and security ties with the Central European states,” foreign policy analyst C Raja Mohan wrote in the Indian Express newspaper, summing up Mr Modi’s wider goal.

“This message is for Blake Lively. Hi Blake. I’m a domestic violence survivor and my heart honestly just broke for the domestic violence community because in this movie, you represented us.”

In a TikTok video that’s been viewed four million times, US woman Ashley Paige launched a blistering attack on the Hollywood actor for how she’s promoted her latest film, It Ends With Us, an adaption of a novel about a woman experiencing domestic abuse.

Critics say it’s been promoted like a romance film, that its one-minute trailer doesn’t adequately disclose the abuse storyline, and that instead of advocacy on the red carpet, Lively has highlighted fashion and florals.

Ms Paige accuses Lively of promoting it like it’s “the sequel to Barbie”.

Lively’s comments during sometimes clumsy promotional interviews have also led to discussion about how to properly talk about victims – and about how survivors of domestic abuse relate to what they’ve been through.

The film is an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel. Lively plays a florist named Lily Bloom who falls head over heels for a surgeon; their romance is exciting and intense, before it turns abusive. The story features several graphically violent scenes, including one of attempted rape.

Lively – the Gossip Girl soap icon turned screen star – is perhaps one of the most marketable actors of the past decade. A Met Gala fixture, besties with Taylor Swift, she and husband Ryan Reynolds are one of Hollywood’s power couples; moguls with their own production company and several off-screen businesses selling their All-American appeal.

Ms Paige, who lives in Colorado with her young daughter, is a survivor of abuse herself who now campaigns on the issue.

“My life story is very reminiscent of [Lively’s character] Lily Bloom’s,” she told the BBC. “I had a daughter with my abuser and we ran.”

But she bristles at how Lively has spoken about the character.

Lively has described Lily as both a “survivor” and a “victim”, and has said “while they are huge labels, these are not her identity”.

“She defines herself and I think it’s deeply empowering that no one else can define you,” she told the BBC at the London premiere in August.

At the New York premiere, when asked about what she would say to survivors, she said: “You are so much more than just a survivor or just a victim. While that is a huge thing, you are a person of multitudes, and what someone has done to you doesn’t define you. You define you.”

But Ms Paige is offended by the idea that she is “more” than a victim. Her trauma isn’t just something she can neatly lock away, she says.

“It has shaped my identity. It shapes the way I communicate. It shapes the way I perceive the world… It shapes everything,” she said.

“And so although it’s not our identity, it permeates every aspect of who we are, because we’re never the same after that.”

On TikTok, US trauma therapist Maddie Spear also shared a video explaining why Lively’s rhetoric was troubling to some.

“While I love the positivity in promoting light and life, oftentimes trauma survivors are told to just make light of their story… and I feel like [Lively’s] actions are doing just that. Her actions are continuing to make victims feel like their story is too heavy to even talk about,” she said in the clip.

In an opinion piece in US magazine Glamour, titled “The Problem with the More Than A Victim Discourse”, writer Kathleen Wash says: “I’m sure it wasn’t her intention, but… saying someone is ‘more than just a survivor’ or ‘more than just a victim’ implies that there’s something bad about identifying as a victim in the first place”.

And a spokesperson for the charity Solace Women’s Aid told the BBC: “While likely not [Lively’s] intention, this sentiment could reinforce some of the shame victims feel about the continuing impact of abuse or make them feel they must just move on from this experience.”

But there is no uniform view on this among those who’ve experienced abuse, say domestic abuse organisations.

Many survivors do relate to Lively’s optimistic message that they are not defined by their trauma, they say.

What might have amplified the anger around Lively’s comments, however, is the view that she has minimised the topic through the film’s wider branding.

Online, video edits have proliferated of Lively’s more blithe responses to questions about her character. In one red carpet video she answers a question about victimhood by joking about her neoprene floral outfit: “You can go deep sea diving in it.”

Another clip that’s gone viral – a promotional video put out on the film’s Instagram page – has Lively encouraging people to watch the film, by saying: “Grab your girls and wear your florals!”

During the press tour, the actor has also promoted her multiple off-screen businesses: a new hair care line and her brand of alcoholic drinks.

Studies show significant links between alcohol and domestic violence. But her drinks business Betty Booze has promoted cocktail recipes inspired by the film’s characters – including the abuser, Ryle.

Ms Paige calls this “wildly inappropriate”.

She says the worst failing of the film is its marketing, which she characterises as misleading.

It’s a view backed by the charity Women’s Aid, which says that “despite domestic abuse being a key theme of the film, much of the marketing has ignored this and viewers have not been warned about the potentially distressing content”.

The US-based National Domestic Violence Hotline says more than one in three (35.6%) of women and one in four men (28.5%) have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.

In the UK, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates one in five adults have experienced domestic abuse – one in four women and one in seven men.

Ms Paige says that immediately after the film’s US premiere, her TikTok feed was full of videos of shell-shocked survivors.

“You watched It Ends With Us and it all came back. The guilt, the shame, the anger, the love-bombing, the fear,” one person wrote.

Another said: “Yeah I went and saw this today, left with a PTSD attack. Was not prepared to see my life play out in front of me.”

“I’m still trying to recover from the movie. Took me right back,” was another comment.

Domestic abuse organisations say that, on the whole, representing abusive situations in popular culture should be done sensitively.

“When making any kind of media about violence against women and girls, the potential impact on survivors should be front and centre in every aspect of its development,” Andrea Simon from the UK-based End Violence against Women Coalition told the BBC earlier this week.

Lively stressed in an earlier interview with BBC News that she and all others on the film felt the “responsibility of servicing the people that care so much about the source material”.

And last week, seemingly in response to the growing criticism, Lively posted her first message of the press tour on social media, linking to domestic abuse phone hotlines and charities.

She also shared the BBC news article about her comments at the UK premiere, and BBC News has approached her for further comment.

Her co-star Brandon Sklenar this week also spoke out about what he saw as the vilification of Lively.

He said: “There isn’t a single person involved in the making of this film that was not aware of the responsibility we had in making this.”

An anthropomorphic monkey and a campaign against “feminist propaganda” set the video gaming community alight this week, following the release of the most successful Chinese title of all time.

Many players were furious after the company behind Black Myth: Wukong sent them a list of topics to avoid while livestreaming the game, including “feminist propaganda, fetishisation, and other content that instigates negative discourse”.

Still, within 24 hours of its release on Tuesday, it became the second most-played game ever on streaming platform Steam, garnering more than 2.1 million concurrent players and selling more than 4.5 million copies.

The game, based on the classic 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, is being seen as a rare example of popular media broadcasting Chinese stories on an international stage.

Black Myth: Wukong is a single-player action game where players take on the role of “the Destined One”- an anthropomorphic monkey with supernatural powers.

The Destined One is based on the character of Sun Wukong, or the Monkey King, a key character in Journey to the West.

That novel, considered one of the greats of Chinese literature, draws heavily from Chinese mythology as well as Confucianism, Taoist and Buddhist folklore.

It has inspired hundreds of international films, TV shows and cartoons, including the popular Japanese anime series Dragon Ball Z and the 2008 Chinese-American fantasy film The Forbidden Kingdom.

First announced via a hugely popular teaser trailer in August 2020, Black Myth launched on Tuesday after four years of anticipation.

It is the Chinese video game industry’s first AAA release – a title typically given to big-budget games from major companies.

High-end graphics, sophisticated game design and hot-blooded hype have all contributed to its success – as well as the size of China’s gaming community, which is the largest in the world.

“It’s not just a Chinese game targeting the Chinese market or the Chinese-speaking world,” Haiqing Yu, a professor at Australia’s RMIT University, whose research specialises in the sociopolitical and economic impact of China’s digital media, told the BBC.

“Players all over the world [are playing] a game that has a Chinese cultural factor.”

This has become a huge source of national pride in the country.

The Department of Culture and Tourism in Shanxi Province, an area that includes many locations and set pieces featured in the game, released a video on Tuesday that showcased the real-world attractions, triggering a surge in tourism dubbed “Wukong Travel”.

Videos posted on TikTok in the wake of Black Myth’s release show tourists flooding temples and shrines featured in the game, in what one X user characterised as a “successful example of cultural rediscovery”.

Niko Partners, a company that researches and analyses video games markets and consumers in Asia, similarly pointed out that Black Myth “helps showcase Chinese mythology, traditions, culture and real-life locations in China to the world”.

Ahead of Black Myth’s release, some content creators and streamers revealed that a company affiliated with its developer had sent them a list of topics to avoid talking about while livestreaming the game: including “feminist propaganda, fetishisation, and other content that instigates negative discourse”.

While it is not clear what was precisely meant by “feminist propaganda”, a widely circulated report by video game publication IGN in November revealed a history of sexist and inappropriate behaviour from employees of Game Science, the studio behind Black Myth.

Other topics designated as “Don’ts” in the document, which has been widely shared on social media and YouTube, included politics, Covid-19, and China’s video game industry policies.

The directive, which was sent out by co-publisher Hero Games, has stoked controversy outside China.

Multiple content creators refused to review the game, claiming its developers were trying to censor discussion and stifle freedom of speech.

Others chose to directly defy the warnings.

One creator with the username Moonmoon launched a Twitch stream of Black Myth titled “Covid-19 Isolation Taiwan (Is a Real Country) Feminism Propaganda”. Another streamer, Rui Zhong, discussed China’s one-child policy on camera while playing the game.

On Thursday, Chinese social media platform Weibo banned 138 users who were deemed to be violating its guidelines when discussing Black Myth.

According to an article on the state-run Global Times news site, a number of the banned Weibo users were “deviating from discussing the game itself but instead using it as a platform for spreading ‘gender opposition,’ ‘personal attacks’, and other irrational comments”.

While the controversy has attracted a lot of attention in international media and online, it has not really dented or detracted from Black Myth’s overwhelmingly positive reception.

The game made $53m in presales alone, with another 4.5 million copies sold within 24 hours of its release. Within the same timeframe it broke the record for the most-played single-player title ever released on Steam.

On platforms like Weibo, Reddit and YouTube, and elsewhere, reams of comments are celebrating the game’s success. Many suggest that the fallout from the controversies surrounding the game’s release has been overblown.

Ms Yu agreed, describing Black Myth as an “industry and overall market success”.

“When it comes to Chinese digital media and communication platforms, of course people cannot avoid talking about censorship,” she said. “Black Myth is… an example of how to tell the Chinese story well, and how to expand Chinese cultural influence globally. I don’t see any censorship there.”

She also pointed out that apparent attempts to steer or censor what reviewers said were unlikely to have come from Chinese officials themselves. More likely, Ms Yu suggested, is that the list of “Dos” and “Don’ts” came from a company that was trying to keep itself out of trouble.

“The company issues their notification so if anybody from the central government comes to have a chat with the company, the company can say, ‘look, I already told them. I can’t stop people from saying what they want to say.’

“They have basically, to use the colloquial term, covered their own ass,” she concluded. “I view it as a politically correct gesture to the Chinese censors, rather than a real directive coming from the top down.”

A would-be burglar in Rome was caught after stopping to read a book on Greek mythology in the middle of a robbery, Italian media report.

The 38-year-old reportedly gained access to a flat in the Italian capital’s Prati district via the balcony but became distracted after picking up a book about Homer’s Iliad on a bedside table.

The 71-year-old homeowner is said to have awoken and confronted the alleged thief, who was engrossed in the book.

News of the failed robbery attracted the attention of the book’s author, who told local media he wanted to send the man a copy so he could “finish” his read.

After being caught off-guard, the alleged robber reportedly attempted to make a quick getaway by escaping via the same balcony, but was arrested shortly afterwards.

He is said to have told police he had climbed the building to visit a person he knew.

“I thought I had ended up in a B&B, saw the book and started to read it.”

Giovanni Nucci, the author of The Gods at Six O’Clock, which explains the Iliad from the perspective of the gods, told Il Messaggero: “It’s fantastic.”

“I’d like to find the person caught red-handed and give him the book, because he’ll have been arrested halfway through reading it. I’d like him to be able to finish it.

“It’s a surreal story, but also full of humanity.”

The thief was reportedly in possession of a bag containing expensive clothing allegedly stolen from another house earlier that evening.

Mr Nucci said his personal favourite deity was Hermes, the god of thieves.

“He is also the god of literature. It is clear: everything fits,” he joked.

A landmark report into problems faced by women in the Malayalam-language film industry has revealed the deep rot in one of India’s most popular film hubs.

The findings of the three-member panel are pretty damning.

The 290-page report – parts of which have been redacted to hide identities of survivors and those accused of wrongdoing – says the industry is dominated by “a mafia of powerful men” and that “sexual harassment of women is rampant”.

Headed by a former judge of the Kerala High Court and set up by the state government in 2017, the Hema committee details the abysmal working conditions on sets – including a lack of toilets and changing rooms for junior artists, no food and water for them, poor pay and no accommodation or transport facilities.

“There are no toilets, so women have to go in the bushes or behind thick trees. During their periods, not being able to change their sanitary napkins for long hours and holding urine for long causes physical discomfort and makes them sick, in some cases needing hospitalisation,” it says.

The report, which was submitted to the government in December 2019, was made public only this week after nearly five years of delay and multiple legal challenges by members of the film industry.

The panel was set up in the aftermath of the horrific sexual assault on a leading actress in the film industry. Bhavana Menon, who has worked in more than 80 films in southern Indian languages and won a number of prestigious awards, was assaulted by a group of men while travelling from Thrissur to Kochi in February 2017.

Her assault made headlines, especially after Dileep, one of the Malayalam-language film industry’s biggest actors and Menon’s co-star in half a dozen films, was named as an accused and charged with criminal conspiracy. He denied the charges, but was arrested and held in custody for three months before being released on bail. The case continues to be heard in court.

Indian law bars identification of survivors of sexual assault, but it was known from the start that it was Ms Menon who had been assaulted. In 2022, she waived her anonymity in a post on Instagram and in an interview to the BBC.

A few months after the attack on Ms Menon, Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) – a group formed by some of her colleagues in a film industry known for its variety of successful mainstream and critically acclaimed films – petitioned the government, seeking swift action in the case and also to address the problems faced by women in cinema.

In the report, retired Justice K Hema says the WCC told her that “women are being silenced as the prestige of the film industry needs to be upheld”.

The panel interviewed several dozen men and women, including artists, producers, directors, scriptwriters, cinematographers, hairstylists, makeup artists and costume designers, and “gathered evidence including video and audio clips and WhatsApp messages”.

Describing sexual harassment as the “worst evil” women in cinema face, the report said the panellists saw evidence that “sexual harassment remains shockingly rampant” and that “it goes on unchecked and uncontrolled”.

The industry “is controlled by a group of male actors, producers, distributors, exhibitors and directors who have gained enormous fame and wealth” and they were among the perpetrators, it added.

“Men in industry make open demands for sex without any qualms as if it’s their birthright. Women are left with very little options but to oblige – or reject at the cost of their long awaited dream of pursuing cinema as their profession.

“The experiences of many women are really shocking and of such gravity that they have not disclosed the details even to their close family members.”

Many of the people the panel approached were initially reluctant to speak because “they were afraid they would lose their jobs”.

“In the beginning, we found their fear strange but as our study progressed we realised it was well-founded. We are concerned about their and their close relatives’ safety.”

The report, the WCC says, has vindicated its stand. “For years, we have been saying that there is a systemic problem in the industry. Sexual harassment is just one of them. This report proves it,” Beena Paul, an award-winning editor and one of the founding members of the WCC, told the BBC.

“We were always told that we were troublemakers [for raising such issues]. This report proves that it [the condition] is far worse than what even we thought,” she said.

Members of the WCC say they have faced difficulty in getting work since they began demanding better working conditions on film sets. “People don’t like the fact that we are asking questions. So, quite a few members have faced difficult situations,” Ms Paul says.

The Association of Malayalam Movie Artists (AMMA), a top industry body which counts superstars like Mohanlal and Mamooty among its members, denied the accusations. Its general secretary Siddique disagreed that there was a small, powerful group that controlled the industry.

He also denied that sexual harassment was rampant in the industry and said that most of the complaints they received were about the delay or a lack of payment for workers. He said conditions for women had improved on film sets in the past five years and all facilities were now available to them.

In the week since its release, the report has created ripples in the state, with activists and prominent opposition leaders demanding action against those accused of wrongdoing.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said if any woman who testified before the committee came forward to file a complaint, the government would take action. “No matter how big they are, they will be brought before the law,” he said.

On Thursday, a public interest petition was filed in the Kerala High Court, seeking initiation of criminal proceedings against those accused in the report.

The court ordered the government to submit a copy of the report and the judges said they would decide if criminal action needed to be taken once they had read it.

Allegations of harassment and abuse in films are not new in India – in 2018, the #MeToo movement hit the country’s most popular film industry Bollywood after actress Tanushree Dutta accused veteran actor Nana Patekar of behaving inappropriately towards her on a film set in 2008. Patekar denied the allegations.

Ms Dutta, who has since claimed that she has been denied work, described the Hema committee report as “useless”, adding that earlier reports about making workplaces safer for women had not helped.

Parvathy Thiruvothu, an award-winning actress and a key member of the WCC, however, told Asianet news channel that she considered the release of the report “a victory”.

“It’s opened up a door for big changes within the industry,” she said.

Jeo Baby, director of The Great Indian Kitchen, a critically-acclaimed film that examines the patriarchal structure within the family, told the BBC that while gender issues remain a concern, change is under way in the industry. “This is the right time to correct this. The film industry has to fight this together.”

The report, which has made several recommendations to make the industry a safe place for women, says their inquiry and recommendations are not to find fault with any individual, but “an earnest attempt to ennoble a profession so that it becomes a viable career option for aspiring artists and technicians, both male and female”.

“Hopefully filmmaking will become so safe that parents can send their daughters and sons to the profession with the same confidence and sense of security as they send their children to an engineering firm or a college,” it adds.

Read more:

• India arrests after actress says she was abducted and raped
• Bhavana Menon breaks silence on sexual assault
• #MeToo: Why sexual harassment is a reality in Bollywood
• Sex harassment claims shake top India dance academy

Malaysian authorities are trying to rescue a woman who fell into an eight-metre deep sinkhole that opened on a busy road in Kuala Lumpur.

The 48-year-old Indian national was sitting on a roadside bench in Jalan India Masjid when the ground beneath her suddenly caved in, according to local police.

Videos on social media show crowds of people watching rescue workers trying to make their way into the sinkhole. Some have ladders, while others are using hammers and diggers to try and clear the way.

There does not appear to be any sign of the woman.

The Kuala Lumpur Fire and Rescue Department said it received a distress call at 08:22 local time (00:22 GMT) and dispatched 15 firemen to the scene.

Operation commander Mohd Riduan Akhbar told local media that a search and rescue operation was being conducted.

“The Special Tactical Operation and Rescue Team of Malaysia (STORM) and the K9 unit are at the location,” he said.

Ninety personnel from various other agencies have also joined in the operation, according to local police chief Assistant Commissioner Sulizmie Affendy Sulaiman.

“We will look at CCTV footage and take statements from witnesses to get a clearer picture of what occurred,” he said.

The BBC has reached out to the Kuala Lumpur Fire and Rescue Department for comment.

Sinkholes generally form when underground water dissolves the rock on the surface, causing a hole to form.

Although there is no precise data globally, geologists say they are reasonably common. Human injuries, however, are very rare.

One of the worst recent sinkholes disasters in terms of casualties occurred in Canada in 2010, when a family of four died after their entire house was swallowed by a gaping sinkhole near Montreal.

The world’s largest sinkhole is Xiaoxhai Tiankeng in south-western China. With a depth measuring 660 metres, researchers believe it was formed more than 128,000 years ago.

When Jimmy Reid goes looking for incredible wildlife to photograph, he doesn’t have to stray very far from home.

He looks under drain covers, beneath rocks and even inside the dilapidated shed in his garden in Loanhead, Midlothian.

To some, the wasps, moths, ants and spiders that emerge may be considered mundane, or even a pest.

To Jimmy, a professional photographer, they are the subject of striking close-up shots revealing fascinating detail.

“I look in the strangest places and I usually get lucky,” he told BBC Scotland News.

“My shed seems to be a gold mine because it’s falling apart.

“It’s incredible that I’ve been doing this for 10 years but I still find creatures that I’ve never seen before.”

The 39-year-old father also travels to nearby woods and country parks to find new species that he hasn’t yet photographed.

“It’s so exciting that I’m tempted to go out most evenings in the summer hunting for new subjects whether it be birds or bugs,” he said.

“When I’m taking pictures of bees and wasps I try to do this at night when they are sleeping as they are less likely to move – but they are hard to find.”

Having a pet crocodile in the backyard sounds like a far-fetched Australian fable – like riding kangaroos to school or the existence of drop bears.

But in the Northern Territory (NT), it’s a reality.

And Trevor Sullivan has 11 of the reptiles sharing his tropical home in Batchelor, about an hour south of Darwin.

Among them is Big Jack, who is named after a Jack in the Box toy due to his alarming propensity for lunging. Despite his antics, the giant predator is adored, having joined Mr Sullivan’s household as a hatchling the same day his daughter was born 22 years ago.

“He’s been part of our family ever since… [my daughter] refers to him as brother.”

Also on the 80-acre property is Cricket, still a tiny critter, and Shah, who – at the complete other end of the scale – is more than a century old and has truly lived a life.

“He’s possibly seen two world wars and maybe federation in Australia [in 1901],” Mr Sullivan says of the 4.7m (15.4ft) beast.

He claims Shah once killed a man, has been used for scientific research, was almost poisoned to death at a bird park, and lost half his bottom jaw in a fight at a Queensland crocodile farm, all before joining Mr Sullivan a few years ago.

The 60-year-old lights up as he tells the BBC about his crocodiles: “There’s nothing like them… crocodiles are the Harley Davidson of pets.”

But as the famously quirky region heads to the polls on Saturday, the right to own a pet croc has turned into a somewhat unlikely – and very Territory – election issue.

The cost of living, housing and crime are the prime concerns for many voters, but Mr Sullivan is one of scores left heartbroken after the governing Labor Party moved to ban crocodiles as pets.

It is one of the last places in the country the practice is allowed, but the government says they’re concerned for the wellbeing of both humans and the reptiles. The Country Liberal Party opposition, however, has pledged its support for the practice and has promised a review of the “rushed” decision if elected.

About 250,000 people call the NT home, but relatively few of them own crocodiles. The environment minister’s office said they could not provide a figure because the government is in election caretaker mode, but previous estimates have put the number of permit holders at around 100.

Many of the captive crocs are raised from hatchlings, others rehomed from farms or after causing trouble in the wild.

Regulations have long dictated strict conditions about where, and under what conditions, the animals can be kept. For example, hatchlings can only live in urban areas until they are 60cm long – usually about a year old – at which point they must be handed over to authorities or moved to a property outside the town limits.

Under those rules, however, owners were not required to have any special training or knowledge to keep the beasts.

Tom Hayes says owning – or “saving” – a crocodile is part of the Territory’s appeal, and one of the factors which drew his young family to the Darwin region, from Queensland, earlier this year.

The 40-year-old grew up taking trips to the NT with his dad, fishing in the Mary River alongside giant crocodiles, instilling a love of predators and, eventually, a dream to have his own one day.

“I’m not just some dude that wants a crocodile [for] when I’m having a barbecue with my mates on the weekend,” the tattooist and self-styled conservationist told the BBC.

“I wanted to have somewhere I could bring these poor old buggers and they could just live their lives out – happy, fed… not having to worry about people shooting them.”

He was in process of adopting a mega croc when the NT government announced it would not be issuing any new permits to keep the reptiles as pets.

It has left Mr Hayes reeling and the crocodile he’d hoped to rescue at risk of being put down.

NT Environment Minister Kate Worden said the decision was made “after public consultation” and “taking into account personal safety and animal welfare concerns”.

Existing permits will remain valid, but transfers of permits will not be allowed.

“Let’s remember they are an apex predator and probably not one that’s best kept for captivity,” Ms Worden told reporters, adding that there were instances of crocodiles attacking their owners in the region.

The new rules bring the NT in in line with every other state and territory in Australia – except, oddly, Victoria, which is well outside of the comfortable climate of a saltwater crocodile.

Animal activists, who had been pushing for the change, say it’s a big win.

While some of the people keeping crocodiles “may have good intentions”, no wild animal can have its needs fully met in captivity, argues Olivia Charlton, from World Animal Protection.

“There is no way to replicate the space and freedom these crocodiles would have in the wild, particularly given they live for up to 70 years,” she said in a statement.

Charles Giliam, from the RSPCA NT, said the dangerous nature of crocodiles also made it extremely hard for authorities to regulate the program and ensure the reptiles had an acceptable standard of living and medical care.

“I only know one vet who’s prepared to work with crocodiles,” he said, as an example.

But croc owners say they had no idea the change was coming and are distressed over what may now happen to their pets.

“I don’t think you spend many nights on the couch watching TV, snuggling with your four-and-a-half-meter crocodile… but there’s still that emotional attachment,” Mr Hayes says.

They accuse the government of hiding the change in a broader Crocodile Management Plan to avoid doing true consultation on the issue.

The opposition environment spokeswoman Jo Hersey said “the [Country Liberal Party] supports the rights of Territorians to own crocs as pets under a permit system” and has promised the party will look at the rules if elected.

Both Mr Hayes and Mr Sullivan said there is broad support for greater training and education requirements for permit holders.

But they say the reptiles are surprisingly easy to care for – and reject arguments that keeping them as pets is harmful.

“In the wild, they have a stretch of territory and they then have to fight to keep it. They’re forever hunting for food, forever chasing off their enemies or trying to keep their girlfriend sorted and life’s pretty tough going,” Mr Sullivan says.

“In captivity, if they got a good enclosure, plenty of water, sunlight, a bit of shade, and food on a regular basis, they just love it.

“I have a river running through my property and I actually have wild crocs always trying to get in and join my mob.”

The decision to end the practice is particularly bad timing for Mr Sullivan. He listed his home and his menagerie for sale last year, so he could join his partner in New Zealand.

“It is a bit like a Willy Wonka story – I want some young kids, of the right nature, to take on a property full of wildlife.”

But that’s left him with a quandary that belongs in a maths textbook: If you have 80 acres and 11 crocodiles on the market, but zero permits available to transfer, what’s the answer?

There is “not a chance” he’ll euthanise his crocs, he says. “I’ll have to stay on the property until I die, or until something else changes.”

His hope is resting on the election of a CLP government on Saturday, adding he thinks it is an issue which will galvanise voters.

But Mr Hayes, on the other hand, hopes it isn’t. There are greater issues at play which should decide votes, he explains, and he is optimistic that both parties will come to see sense anyway.

“Whoever’s in needs to really look at it… It’s an attack on the Territory way of life.”

A TikTok star from a small city in Tennessee has made it his mission to show the world British food is not all that bad.

Food reviewer Kalani Smith, who goes by Kalani Ghost Hunter (KGH) online, racks up millions of views posting his reviews on social media – from Welsh cakes to Greggs.

After initially building up a following investigating the paranormal, a pivot to reviewing British culinary staples has seen Mr Smith’s follower count balloon to more than three million on TikTok alone.

Having recently toured south Wales, Mr Smith boldly declared Cardiff Market’s food beats London’s Camden Market’s “10 times out of 10”.

“The most interesting thing about this journey… is that the perception around the world, especially in the US, is that the food in the UK is bland, it’s bad,” said Mr Smith.

“I think my whole objective up until this point has been is to document that this is not the case.

“There’s obviously things that are not good in every country, but there’s also some things that are absolutely incredible.”

“A lot of people come to the UK and they visit London, and that’s their extent of visiting the UK,” said Mr Smith, who hails from Mount Juliet in Tennessee.

“Whereas I’ve been to so many cities in the UK that I’ve got a pretty good perception and understanding of the majority of food… I’ve had so many of the regional dishes.”

Mr Smith’s social media career as a ghost hunter took an unexpected turn when, on a trip to the UK earlier this year, he decided to review arguably the most British meal of them all – a roast dinner.

“Things really took a change for me after that point,” said Mr Smith, who has been a food reviewer ever since.

Throughout his travels in the UK, the almost-exclusive setting for his reviews, he found one cuisine particularly stood out.

“The UK’s curry scene is untouchable,” he said.

“You can go to so many different parts of the UK and get a really good curry.”

However, Mr Smith does not have such kind words for all of the UK’s traditional dishes, saying pie, mash and liquor was the worst thing he had.

“That’s a London thing… but that liquor sauce is just not something that I would ever want to eat again.”

On a recent whistle-stop tour of south Wales, Mr Smith visited Newport, Cardiff, Port Talbot and Swansea.

“One of the highlights of the trip definitely had to be the Welsh cake… absolutely incredible,” said Mr Smith, after visiting Cardiff Bakestones in the city’s market.

“My first trip here, I had a horrible Welsh cake from Morrisons out of a package, and everyone told me, you have to get a fresh one.

“We went to the Cardiff market and had some incredible food, Welsh cake being one of those.”

Another highlight of Welsh cuisine was our famed traditional Welsh… tacos?

“Some of the best tacos I’ve had in the UK can be found in Cardiff Market,” he said of the market’s The Bearded Taco.

In Swansea, he said he had a “really good experience” with cockles and laverbread and Welsh rarebit.

“I had to get laverbread from Wales. I had this cockles and laverbread concoction that actually was really good.

“Laverbread by itself, without cooking. It was not a good idea.”

He did, however, tempt the wrath of Swansea natives with a less than perfect, but still positive, review of Joe’s Ice Cream.

“Joe’s Ice Cream in Swansea is one that I’ve had commented hundreds and hundreds of times, and everyone from Swansea talks about Joe’s Ice Cream.

“Joe’s Ice Cream is good, but it doesn’t rank in the top 10 for best ice cream I’ve ever had.

“It’s not something that I would drive or stand in line for.”

Mr Smith said the skill of balancing locals’ passion for their signature dishes with giving an honest review was an important part of the job.

“The key is – you have to be respectful, right? – If you watch any video that I do, even if it is negative, most of the time, I try my best to be respectful.

“Each city in each region has a dish that they kind of cling to and and they’re proud of this dish.

“If I don’t think something tastes good, I’m not going to say [it does] to, you know, save someone’s feelings.

“Just because it’s not my taste and it’s not something I enjoy doesn’t mean that someone else out there doesn’t… I will always be honest with people.”

The Israeli military says its warplanes are hitting Hezbollah targets in Lebanon after detecting moves to fire missiles and rockets into Israel.

“In a self-defence act to remove these threats, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is striking terror targets,” IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said.

Israel said Lebanese civilians had been warned to immediately leave areas where Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shia Muslim group, was operating.

Shortly afterwards, Hezbollah said it had launched a large-scale drone attack on Israel in response to last month’s killing of the group’s senior military commander.

Across northern Israel sirens warning of incoming rockets were heard sounding early on Sunday.

There were no immediate reports of any injuries.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was convening an urgent meeting of his security cabinet.

Israel has been exchanging fire with the Lebanon-based militant group since the start of the war last October with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov has been arrested by French police at an airport north of Paris.

Mr Durov was detained after his private jet had landed at Le Bourget Airport, French media reported.

According to officials the 39-year-old had been arrested under a warrant for offences related to the popular messaging app.

Russia’s embassy in France is taking “immediate steps” to clarify the situation, according to Russia’s TASS state news agency.

Durov had been travelling on his private jet, French TV channel TF1 said on its website.

Telegram is particularly popular in Russia, Ukraine and former Soviet Union states.

The app was banned in Russia in 2018, after a previous refusal by Mr Durov to hand over user data.

But the ban was reversed in 2021.

Telegram is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Wechat.

Mr Durov founded Telegram in 2013 and he left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform, which he sold.

German police have arrested a man suspected of killing three people and injuring another eight in Friday’s knife attack in the western city of Solingen, a regional minister has said.

“The man we’ve really been looking for the whole day has just been taken into custody,” Herbert Reul, the interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, told ARD public TV late on Saturday.

He gave no details, but Germany’s Bild and Spiegel news websites reported that the suspect, in dirty blood-stained clothes, had given himself up.

Two men, aged 56 and 67, and a 56-year-old woman were stabbed to death during a festival, in what Chancellor Olaf Scholz described as a “horrific act”.

“We have found evidence,” Mr Reul told ARD Tagesthemen news.

The minister said he was the man “we most suspected”.

A state interior ministry spokesman confirmed that the man had turned himself in.

This was the third arrest on Saturday, following the stabbing attack that shocked Germany.

Earlier police said a man was detained at a refugee centre close to the site of the attack.

Bild reported that special task force (SEK) officers stormed the refugee centre, arresting a suspect.

It said the building was located about 300m (984ft) from Fronhof – Solingen’s central market square where people were stabbed on Friday night.

That arrest came a few hours after a 15-year-old boy was detained. Officials said he was not the main suspect – but was alleged to have known about the attack.

The Islamic State group on Saturday claimed responsibility for the attack.

It did not immediately provide any evidence and it was not clear how close any relationship with the attacker was.

The attacker reportedly stabbed passers-by at random during a festival to celebrate 650 years since the industrial city of Solingen was founded.

The situation in the square after the attack was “very hectic”, which made it difficult to find the perpetrator, the police said.

They also confirmed that the attacker “targeted” people’s throats and necks.

Solingen – a city famous for its steel industry – has about 160,000 inhabitants. It lies about 25km (15 miles) east of Düsseldorf.

The city’s authorities asked people to leave the Fronhof area after the attack at about 22:00 local time (21:00 BST) on Friday.

The planned three-day celebrations of the city anniversary – for which about 75,000 people had been expected – were cancelled after the attack.

Solingen Mayor Tim Kurzbach later said that “all of us in Solingen are in shock, horror and great sadness.

“It breaks my heart that an attack has happened in our city. I have tears in my eyes when I think of those we’ve lost.

“I pray for all those still fighting for their lives. Also my greatest sympathy for all those who had to experience this, these images must have been horrific.”

The entrance to Fronhof is now being guarded by police.

People have been bringing flowers and candles to the site of the attack that shocked the entire country.

Players from Germany’s top Bundesliga football league wore black armbands during Saturday’s matches.

Until midnight last Sunday, Matteo Cannia was sitting out on a bench overlooking the sea in Porticello. It was too hot to sleep.

The 78-year-old, a fisherman since the age of 10, saw the first flashes of lightning. “I heard the thunder and the wind and decided to go home,” he told me.

“As the storm grew, everyone woke. Water was coming into my friend’s house.”

At about 04:15 local time, Fabio Cefalù – a fisherman who had been due to go out that wild Monday morning but, like others, decided against it – suddenly saw a flare go up.

He changed his mind and went out to sea to find out what was going on – and discovered only cushions and floating planks of wood.

A luxury super yacht called the Bayesian, moored only a few hundred metres away, had already sunk.

It all happened in a 16-minute window of disaster, chaos and torment, which catapulted a sleepy Sicilian fishing port to the centre of world news.

All but seven of the 22 passengers of the Bayesian had scrambled into a life raft as the yacht began to capsize. The others never made it out.

Charlotte Golunski, a British woman, was thrown into the water with her one-year-old daughter, Sophie. She told of clutching her baby in the air with all her strength to keep her from drowning. “It was all black around me,” she said, “and the only thing I could hear were the screams of others.”

She, her baby, and her husband James were among those rescued by a nearby sailing boat captain. Trapped inside the sinking Bayesian was her colleague Mike Lynch – one of the UK’s top tech entrepreneurs, dubbed “Britain’s Bill Gates”.

Mr Lynch had brought together family, friends and colleagues for an idyllic holiday on his luxury boat: a sumptuous 56-metre (184ft) sailing yacht that won design awards and had the world’s tallest aluminium mast.

In June, he was acquitted after a lengthy trial in the US on charges that he had fraudulently inflated the value of his company, Autonomy, before selling it to Hewlett Packard in 2011. The trip was planned as a celebration of freedom to mark his rehabilitation in public opinion.

Three days after the yacht went down, his body was retrieved by divers from the wreckage.

A day later, the body of his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, who was due to begin studying at the University of Oxford next month, was recovered.

Among the others who died were the president of the investment bank Morgan Stanley, Jonathan Bloomer, and his wife Judy; Mr Lynch’s lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda; and the yacht’s chef, Recaldo Thomas. Mr Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, survived.

The family has released a statement talking of their “unspeakable grief”, adding they are “devastated and in shock”.

How the super yacht sank so quickly while other smaller vessels nearby survived the storm undamaged has dumbfounded experts.

In a press conference this weekend – the first public statement by officials since the disaster – local prosecutors said they had begun an investigation into potential crimes of manslaughter and negligent shipwreck.

The region’s state prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio told reporters that while the probe was at a very early stage and nobody specific was being investigated, there were “many possibilities for culpability. It could be just the captain. It could be the whole crew… we are absolutely not ruling anything out”.

A small team of British marine investigators has also been sent to Sicily to work with their Italian counterparts.

Prosecutors said that they now believed a downburst was the weather phenomenon that hit the ship: a localised, powerful wind that descends from a thunderstorm and spreads unpredictably.

That contradicted previous reports that had identified the cause as a waterspout, or mini tornado at sea.

Either way, it’s clear extreme weather played a major role.

Much of the focus for the investigation team is of course on the conduct of the captain, 51-year-old James Cutfield from New Zealand. He survived, along with eight of his crew, and is being questioned.

“We didn’t see it coming,” he told Italian media, alluding to the storm, in his only public comment so far.

The problem is: plenty of others did. Violent winds and rain were forecast, following days of searing heat. The head of the company that built the Bayesian, Giovanni Costantino, told me he was convinced there had been a litany of errors on board.

“At the back of the boat, a hatch must have been left open,” he said, “but also perhaps a side entrance for water to have poured inside.

“Before the storm, the captain should have closed every opening, lifted anchor, turned on the engine, pointed into the wind and lowered the keel.”

A keel is a large, fin-like part of the boat that protrudes from its base.

“That would have stabilised the vessel, they would have been able to traverse the storm and continue their cruise in comfort,” he said.

Rescuers instead found the wreckage of the Bayesian 50 metres underwater with its almost 10-metre-long keel raised.

Had it been deployed, it could have helped counter the wind buffeting the Bayesian’s 75-metre high aluminium mast and kept the ship stable. But without it, experts told the newspaper La Repubblica that gusts of 100 kilometres an hour (62mph) would have been enough to capsize the ship – and Monday’s storm far exceeded that.

“The Bayesian was a model for many other vessels because of its stability and exceptionally high performance,” Mr Costantino said. “There was absolutely no problem with it. If water hadn’t surged in, it was unsinkable.”

He told me there were 16 minutes between the power going out on the ship at 03:56 – showing that water was flooding areas with electrical circuits – and the GPS signal being lost, indicating the moment it sank.

That period, along with any measures taken to mitigate the extreme weather, will be pored over by investigators, particularly once they locate the vessel’s black box recorder.

Rino Casilli, one of Sicily’s top ship surveyors, similarly believes that errors may have made the yacht vulnerable to the extreme weather.

“There should have been two members of the crew taking turns to be on watch overnight, given the storm warning,” he told me as he took me out on his boat – around a third of the size of the Bayesian. “And it should have been moored in the harbour, not out at sea.”

It has not yet been established how many people, if any, were on watch that night.

From his sailing boat, we gained rare access to the spot where the Bayesian went down.

Around us, an Italian police vessel circulated, warning us back. Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity among divers, as other rescue vessels arrived.

We didn’t know at the time – but they had just located more bodies.

It was an intensely challenging operation for the teams to recover those trapped in the wreckage. Given its depth, at 50 metres underwater, each diver was allowed 10 minutes down before resurfacing for their safety – 120 dives in total. They were assisted by remote control vehicles that could operate on the seabed for far longer.

In this weekend’s press conference, rescuers said the passengers trapped inside during the sinking took refuge in cabins on the ship’s left side, where the last air bubbles formed.

Five of the bodies were found in the first cabin on the left, they said, while the last body – confirmed as Hannah Lynch – was in the third cabin on the left side.

Access for the emergency teams was extremely difficult since the yacht remained largely intact with its furniture obstructing entry.

The coastguard compared it to an “18-storey building full of water”. When Ms Lynch’s body was brought ashore emergency workers on the port applauded their colleagues.

All seven of the dead have been transported to a mortuary for post-mortems.

Rescuers will now need to decide whether – and how – to salvage the wreckage, which would undoubtedly offer vital clues as to what happened. But bringing the Bayesian to the surface could take six to eight weeks and cost 15 million euros (£12.7m) by some estimates.

While the divers’ painstaking work to recover the dead has ended, the investigators’ painful hunt for answers has only begun.

They and the survivors are hunkered down in a hotel close to Porticello, which is strictly off-limits to journalists. Security guards promptly asked us to leave.

Solving the enigma of what happened to the Bayesian will be crucial not only to help loved ones of the victims reach some sort of closure, but also for the maritime industry to draw conclusions.

The brother of James Cutfield, the captain, said he was a “well-respected” sailor who had worked on boats his whole life. Did the experienced sailor somehow make a series of catastrophic errors? The trade union Nautilus, which represents seafarers and captains, called for restraint in passing judgement on the Bayesian’s crew.

“Any attempt to question their conduct without the full facts is not only unfair but also harmful to the process of uncovering the truth and learning any lessons from this tragedy,” it said.

The world’s media has begun to leave Porticello, which is gradually returning to the tranquillity of its pre-Bayesian era. Stray cats roam among the old fishing boats, and children play as their families eat out at the few seaside restaurants.

But what has happened over the past week has stunned and scarred many here.

“Last Sunday night, we saw the end of the world in Porticello,” said resident Maria Vizzo. “We’ve never seen something like this. Everyone here is shocked – and everyone is crying.”

Two Nasa astronauts who have been stuck in space for over two months will return to Earth in February 2025 with SpaceX.

Nasa said the Boeing Starliner spacecraft the astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore had travelled to International Space Station (ISS) on would return to Earth “un-crewed”.

The pair took off on what was planned to be an eight-day mission on 5 June but will now spend around eight months in orbit.

The Starliner experienced problems on its way to the ISS, including leaks of helium, which pushes fuel into the propulsion system. Several thrusters also did not work properly.

Boeing and SpaceX were both awarded billion-dollar contracts by Nasa to provide commercial space flights for its astronauts. Boeing’s was worth $4.2bn (£3.18bn) while SpaceX, which was founded by billionaire Elon Musk, got $2.6bn.

SpaceX has so far sent nine crewed flights to space for Nasa, as well as some commercial missions, but this was Boeing’s first attempt at a crewed mission.

Engineers at Boeing and Nasa have spent months trying to understand the technical issues with the Starliner craft.

They have been carrying out tests and gathering data, both in space and back on the Earth. Their hope was to pin down the root of the problems and find a way to return the astronauts home safely on Starliner.

Speaking at a press conference on Saturday, Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson said Boeing has been working closely with Nasa to understand what improvements need to be made to the spacecraft.

“Space flight is a risk, even at its safest and even at its most routine, and a test flight, by nature, is neither safe nor routine,” he said.

“Our core value is safety and it is our north star.”

The decision has been made to extend the pair’s stay on the ISS until February 2025 so they can return on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft.

The extra time allows SpaceX to launch its next vehicle, with lift-off scheduled for the end of September.

It was supposed to have four astronauts on board, but will instead travel to the space station with two. This leaves room for Mr Wilmore and Ms Williams to join them in the vehicle to return to Earth at the end of its planned mission next February.

Nasa has said both astronauts had previously completed two long-duration stays in space and understood the risks of the test flight, including being aboard the station longer than planned.

The organisation said Mr Wilmore, 61, and Ms Williams, 58, both “fully” supported the plans for their return and would spend the next few months carrying out scientific work, space maintenance and possibly doing some “spacewalks”.

Boeing’s Starliner had already been delayed for several years because of setbacks in the spacecraft’s development. Previous un-crewed flights also suffered technical problems.

In a statement, Boeing said it continued to focus “on the safety of the crew and spacecraft”.

“We are executing the mission as determined by Nasa, and we are preparing for a safe and successful un-crewed return,” it added.

An anthropomorphic monkey and a campaign against “feminist propaganda” set the video gaming community alight this week, following the release of the most successful Chinese title of all time.

Many players were furious after the company behind Black Myth: Wukong sent them a list of topics to avoid while livestreaming the game, including “feminist propaganda, fetishisation, and other content that instigates negative discourse”.

Still, within 24 hours of its release on Tuesday, it became the second most-played game ever on streaming platform Steam, garnering more than 2.1 million concurrent players and selling more than 4.5 million copies.

The game, based on the classic 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, is being seen as a rare example of popular media broadcasting Chinese stories on an international stage.

Black Myth: Wukong is a single-player action game where players take on the role of “the Destined One”- an anthropomorphic monkey with supernatural powers.

The Destined One is based on the character of Sun Wukong, or the Monkey King, a key character in Journey to the West.

That novel, considered one of the greats of Chinese literature, draws heavily from Chinese mythology as well as Confucianism, Taoist and Buddhist folklore.

It has inspired hundreds of international films, TV shows and cartoons, including the popular Japanese anime series Dragon Ball Z and the 2008 Chinese-American fantasy film The Forbidden Kingdom.

First announced via a hugely popular teaser trailer in August 2020, Black Myth launched on Tuesday after four years of anticipation.

It is the Chinese video game industry’s first AAA release – a title typically given to big-budget games from major companies.

High-end graphics, sophisticated game design and hot-blooded hype have all contributed to its success – as well as the size of China’s gaming community, which is the largest in the world.

“It’s not just a Chinese game targeting the Chinese market or the Chinese-speaking world,” Haiqing Yu, a professor at Australia’s RMIT University, whose research specialises in the sociopolitical and economic impact of China’s digital media, told the BBC.

“Players all over the world [are playing] a game that has a Chinese cultural factor.”

This has become a huge source of national pride in the country.

The Department of Culture and Tourism in Shanxi Province, an area that includes many locations and set pieces featured in the game, released a video on Tuesday that showcased the real-world attractions, triggering a surge in tourism dubbed “Wukong Travel”.

Videos posted on TikTok in the wake of Black Myth’s release show tourists flooding temples and shrines featured in the game, in what one X user characterised as a “successful example of cultural rediscovery”.

Niko Partners, a company that researches and analyses video games markets and consumers in Asia, similarly pointed out that Black Myth “helps showcase Chinese mythology, traditions, culture and real-life locations in China to the world”.

Ahead of Black Myth’s release, some content creators and streamers revealed that a company affiliated with its developer had sent them a list of topics to avoid talking about while livestreaming the game: including “feminist propaganda, fetishisation, and other content that instigates negative discourse”.

While it is not clear what was precisely meant by “feminist propaganda”, a widely circulated report by video game publication IGN in November revealed a history of sexist and inappropriate behaviour from employees of Game Science, the studio behind Black Myth.

Other topics designated as “Don’ts” in the document, which has been widely shared on social media and YouTube, included politics, Covid-19, and China’s video game industry policies.

The directive, which was sent out by co-publisher Hero Games, has stoked controversy outside China.

Multiple content creators refused to review the game, claiming its developers were trying to censor discussion and stifle freedom of speech.

Others chose to directly defy the warnings.

One creator with the username Moonmoon launched a Twitch stream of Black Myth titled “Covid-19 Isolation Taiwan (Is a Real Country) Feminism Propaganda”. Another streamer, Rui Zhong, discussed China’s one-child policy on camera while playing the game.

On Thursday, Chinese social media platform Weibo banned 138 users who were deemed to be violating its guidelines when discussing Black Myth.

According to an article on the state-run Global Times news site, a number of the banned Weibo users were “deviating from discussing the game itself but instead using it as a platform for spreading ‘gender opposition,’ ‘personal attacks’, and other irrational comments”.

While the controversy has attracted a lot of attention in international media and online, it has not really dented or detracted from Black Myth’s overwhelmingly positive reception.

The game made $53m in presales alone, with another 4.5 million copies sold within 24 hours of its release. Within the same timeframe it broke the record for the most-played single-player title ever released on Steam.

On platforms like Weibo, Reddit and YouTube, and elsewhere, reams of comments are celebrating the game’s success. Many suggest that the fallout from the controversies surrounding the game’s release has been overblown.

Ms Yu agreed, describing Black Myth as an “industry and overall market success”.

“When it comes to Chinese digital media and communication platforms, of course people cannot avoid talking about censorship,” she said. “Black Myth is… an example of how to tell the Chinese story well, and how to expand Chinese cultural influence globally. I don’t see any censorship there.”

She also pointed out that apparent attempts to steer or censor what reviewers said were unlikely to have come from Chinese officials themselves. More likely, Ms Yu suggested, is that the list of “Dos” and “Don’ts” came from a company that was trying to keep itself out of trouble.

“The company issues their notification so if anybody from the central government comes to have a chat with the company, the company can say, ‘look, I already told them. I can’t stop people from saying what they want to say.’

“They have basically, to use the colloquial term, covered their own ass,” she concluded. “I view it as a politically correct gesture to the Chinese censors, rather than a real directive coming from the top down.”

While the US and Russia were busy finalising the biggest exchange of prisoners since the Cold War, a gifted but little-known Russian pianist was dying in silence in jail.

Pavel Kushnir had protested repeatedly against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and began a hunger strike soon after his arrest in May, later refusing water too.

He died, slowly and without publicity, on 28 July – four days before a group of better-known dissidents were swapped for Kremlin spies, sleeper agents and killers imprisoned in the West.

After his lonely death, at a pre-trial detention centre in Birobidzhan in Russia’s Far East, the 39-year-old was mourned by only 11 people at his cremation.

Svetlana Kaverzina, an independent politician in Siberia, said no-one had tried to talk him out of sacrificing himself because they hadn’t been aware what was happening.

“We couldn’t chip in and send him a lawyer – we didn’t know,” she wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “He was alone.”

The YouTube channel where Kushnir published four anti-war videos had only five subscribers when he was arrested.

His “Foreign Agent Mulder” posts were a reference to a character in the US TV series, the X Files, which was popular in Russia in the 1990s, and also to a Russian law that allows people considered politically suspect to be declared “foreign agents”. In one clip Kushnir even appears with a hand-drawn FBI badge.

His final film, released in January, addressed the 2022 massacre of civilians by Russian troops in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv.

A few months later, a Telegram channel close to the secret services, Operational Reports, posted a video showing masked men leading Kushnir into a white minivan.

It added that a criminal case had been opened, accusing him of making a public call to engage in terrorist activity, which is punishable by up to seven years in jail.

Nothing more was heard until 2 August, when the human rights activist Olga Romanova and the pianist’s friend, Olga Shkrygunova, revealed his death in an article published by online news organisation Vot Tak.

His 79-year-old mother, Irina Levina, later confirmed her son had died.

Kushnir was born in Tambov, central Russia, where his father Mikhail was a pianist and educator, and his mother a music school teacher.

He started playing piano at the age of two and, at just 17, gave a remarkable two-and-a-half-hour concert featuring the 24 preludes and fugues by composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Later that year, he was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory, where classmate Julia Wertman says he cultivated a “dissident image”, often wearing a shabby coat and black clothes, with a half-litre bottle of vodka sticking out of a pocket.

Asked in a 2005 interview what composition he would never perform, he replied: “The Russian national anthem.”

After graduation, Shkrygunova says Kushnir deliberately took jobs in smaller cities, believing he would have more musical and personal freedom outside Moscow.

He moved to Yekaterinburg, then Kursk, and spent three years in Kurgan, a city to the east of the Ural mountains, before he lost his job at the philharmonic orchestra there in 2022.

Shkrygunova does not know exactly why he was dismissed, but adds: “This was a cog that didn’t fit any machine, and it had been that way since his childhood.”

After four months without a job, he became a soloist with the Birobidzhan Philharmonic, telling local television: “If I’m not imprisoned, drafted into the army, or fired, then I hope to spend the next 12 years with you.”

Kushnir spent his free time protesting against the war.

In emails to friends he described sticking posters around Birobidzhan at night, with slogans angrily denouncing the draft, and describing Vladimir Putin as a fascist.

He also began staging hunger strikes: first for 20 days in the spring of 2023, then for three months later that year.

Shkrygunova says Kushnir knew the danger he was putting himself in.

“It was his solitary protest,” she says. “An act by someone who didn’t know what else he could do.”

She tried to convince him to leave Russia, or at least to perform in Berlin, where she now lives. But they never managed to arrange the trip.

In late March, Kushnir spoke to Shkrygunova for the last time, telling her he felt like he was being watched and that he “kept seeing the same person”.

“Whatever happens, happens: I’m doing this for a reason,” he added.

Birobidzhan City Court records contain no information about a criminal case against him, though there is a record of a non-criminal case of “petty hooliganism” submitted on 20 June.

On 19 July, Kushnir was fined an unknown amount, but it is unclear whether he attended the hearing.

The court then sent him a copy of the verdict, but it was returned on 30 July with the note “not possible to deliver”.

By then, of course, Kushnir was already dead.

The independent news site, Mediazona, spoke to someone who saw him shortly before he died.

They described him as “like a skeleton”, who by mid-July could barely walk and was “in very poor condition”.

The official cause of death was “dilated cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure”.

The FSB and the Birobidzhan Court did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment. The regional head of Russia’s prison service, Vasily Mikhaylenko, told Mediazona he knew nothing about the case.

After Kushnir’s death, his mother told another independent news organisation, Okno, that she had tried and failed to influence her son.

“I certainly wanted him to conduct himself in a quieter way and stay out of politics altogether.

“I am very sorry that he gave up his life, apparently for nothing at all.”

But Shkrygunova disagrees, saying that Kushnir knew all along that he was risking his life so that he could express his anti-war views.

“He understood there might have been another way,” Shkrygunova adds.

“But by the time he had realised it, there was no turning back. He knew he was going to go all the way – so it wouldn’t turn out to be a wasted effort.”

In death, Kushnir has attracted more attention than he ever received in his lifetime.

A book he wrote in 2014 has quickly been republished in Germany.

Grace Chatto, a member of Grammy-award-winning electronic music group Clean Bandit who studied with Kushnir at the Moscow Conservatory, wrote an emotional tribute on Instagram to her “gentle and funny” friend.

And 22 leading classical musicians including Daniel Barenboim, Sir Simon Rattle and Martha Argerich wrote an open letter to remember a “remarkable artist” they had never met.

Although Kushnir’s YouTube channel had single-figure subscribers in his lifetime, his most popular clip has now been viewed more than 22,000 times.

The month since Kamala Harris launched her presidential campaign has been a largely unprecedented spell in American politics: never has a modern general election campaign gone from a standstill to a full sprint so quickly.

In that time Democrats pulled together a well-scripted national convention with slickly produced promotional videos, political set-pieces and musical interludes, all done to boost the new nominee. It was a remarkable test of skill by party operatives under extreme pressure.

Over the course of four days in Chicago – and in the packed campaign rallies Ms Harris has held over the past few weeks – the outlines of her campaign strategy have begun to take shape.

And it’s not exactly what one would expect from a sitting vice-president who has occupied an office in the White House for three-and-a-half-years.

Ms Harris is pushing hard to be viewed as the candidate of change in this race. One who, as she said in her convention speech on Thursday, can “chart a new way forward”.

This strategy is in part born out of necessity. Across the globe democracies have been roiled by voter unrest. As economies struggle to recover from the Covid pandemic, regional conflicts churn and tensions over immigration flare up, political incumbents have faced deeply unhappy electorates in Canada, the UK, Germany and India among others.

Polling indicated that President Joe Biden, before he abandoned his re-election campaign last month, was set to confront similar challenges.

The vice-president has turned this situation on its head.

Her background and personal story is a sharp contrast with both the current president and her Republican opponent.

It also helps that Ms Harris is running against a former president who, while also styling himself as a change candidate, has his own sometimes controversial, sometimes unpopular White House record to defend.

“This election, I do strongly believe, is about two very different visions for the future,” Ms Harris said at a rally in North Carolina last week.

“Ours focused on the future, and the other focused on the past.”

For the most part, Ms Harris has shied away from describing in detail what her presidency would look like.

There’s talk of unity and a way beyond America’s divisive partisanship; a focus on strengthening the economy and reducing consumer prices; and a heavy emphasis on reproductive rights and abortion – an area of particular strength for Democrats.

But it is vague. And this vagueness may suit the Harris campaign just fine.

By largely being an empty policy vessel, Ms Harris has allowed various constituencies within the Democratic Party to project their hopes and priorities onto her.

If she can keep all those pieces together for the next few months, she might just win.

• Democrats are riding high but victory is far from certain

Labour leaders expressed optimism that she would focus on union protections and bread-and-butter economic issues.

Climate activists touted the Biden administration’s clean energy legislation and expected the candidate to expand that effort.

Civil rights leaders predicted the first woman of colour to win a major party nomination would advance racial equality.

“The fundamental question people ask is, are you fighting for me, or are you fighting for someone else?” said Tom Perez, who served as secretary of labour in the Obama administration and has been an adviser to the Biden White House.

“I think people have a pretty clear sense that she’s a fighter for everyone, not just certain people in certain zip codes or certain tax brackets, not just people of certain races or ethnicities, but everyone.”

In other words, the vice-president’s policy vagueness has allowed her to cast as broad an appeal as possible in what is shaping up to be an election where every undecided voter counts.

It has been labelled by some as a “vibe” campaign – based at least in part on feeling and general impressions.

On Wednesday, former television host, author and international celebrity Oprah Winfrey, who identified herself as a political independent, said Ms Harris and her running mate Tim Walz were the candidates who would deliver “decency and respect”.

“I’m calling on all you independents and all you undecideds,” she said. “Values and character matter most of all, in leadership and in life.”

Throughout the week, a parade of Republicans – including former officeholders and Donald Trump supporters – also took the stage at the convention to pitch Harris as the best option in November.

“Harris will want to be centre-left, not far-left,” said Chris Shays, a former Republican congressman from Connecticut who attended the Democratic Convention this year.

According to Mr Shays, the vice-president will be pulled to the American political middle because that is where the nation is.

Ms Harris’s strategy is not without risk, however.

Just as Democratic groups are projecting their ideas onto the vice-president’s campaign, so are her Republican opponents. And they are using Ms Harris’s past, more liberal – and sometimes controversial – positions and statements as evidence that the lack of specificity is merely a cover for a left-wing agenda.

“Her speech was the perfect example of what happens when you have no solutions to offer for the problems you’ve delivered to Americans’ doorsteps, so you gaslight and deflect,” the Trump campaign said in a statement responding to the vice-president’s convention address.

Ms Harris has also avoided sweeping press conferences and more pointed interviews with mainstream media outlets so far – interviews that could hold her to account for past positions and press her for further policy details.

Her speech last week addressing the economy was one of the few instances where the vice-president unveiled concrete new proposals.

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But over the past four days some nuggets of how she would govern have emerged.

She has proposed a $25,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers. She pledged to use the power of government to reduce the cost of prescription drugs and punish price-gouging for groceries. She backed bipartisan immigration legislation that was blocked in the Senate earlier this year.

Ms Harris also pledged to push for a federal law that would guarantee a basic right to abortion across the entire US, pre-empting conservative state bans.

For some Democrats the details so far aren’t enough.

“We need to hear some actual policy things,” said Lewanna Tucker, chair of the Democratic Party in Fulton County, Georgia. “She needs to be letting us a little bit more behind the curtain and talk about structural things that are going to be done.”

Perhaps more concrete policy details aren’t necessary. At a time when American politics is viewed by much of the American public as divisive and toxic, there may be benefit to building a political campaign not around policy specifics, but rather one that appeals to emotion.

In 2008, Barack Obama successfully campaigned on hope and change – which is not exactly the makings of a four-point plan.

“It’s a return to a level of hope that I don’t think that we have collectively experienced since 2008,” said Yasmin Radjy, who runs the liberal grassroots organising group Swing Left.

She said there had been an exhaustion among volunteers on the left for the past eight years, but the switch to Ms Harris was “like a weight had lifted off their shoulders”.

The willingness by Democrats to savage the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 – a sometimes controversial blueprint for a new Republican administration that Trump and his campaign have repeatedly disavowed – also shows the risks of being even tangentially associated with the nuts and bolts of governing.

In her Thursday night address, Ms Harris pledged to move beyond partisan divisions and find shared common ground.

“I promise to be a president for all Americans,” she said. “You can always trust me to put country above party and self.”

Those promises aren’t unfamiliar in American politics, of course. Similar assurances have been made over the last few decades. But something has been different about this Democratic nominee and Democratic convention.

The wattage of star power this week – with appearances by Pink, Stevie Wonder and Lil Jon, among others – and the campaign’s heavy reliance on pop culture connections, like Charlie XCX, suggest it is trying to position itself as a cultural movement rather than a political one.

It remains to be seen whether this will be an effective strategy.

But at least for now, it has pulled the Democratic Party out of the doldrums and despair of early July and into a dead heat with Trump and the Republicans heading into the crucial final months of this campaign.

If brat described our wild and unapologetically messy summers, then exemplary manners, politeness and being a stickler for rules is what’s taking us into autumn.

In recent weeks, thousands of videos showing us how to refine our etiquette have popped up on TikTok, all off the back of the “very demure, very mindful” trend.

The satirical idea started out as poking fun at the stereotypical ideas of femininity, but it has since taken on a life of its own.

While half of the internet are using the phrase ironically, others are concerned that the trend is just another way of setting unrealistic standards for women.

So, is anyone actually trying to be demure, or is this just a massive in-joke that’s been blown out of proportion?

The seemingly harmless catchphrase was coined by content creator Jools Lebron, who posted a TikTok earlier this month on her demure work outfit and mindful make-up.

“You see how I do my make-up for work? Very demure, very mindful,” she told her millions of followers.

“A lot of you girls go to the interview looking like Marge Simpson and go to the job looking like Patty and Selma. Not demure.”

She also reminds us that when dressing for the office, her shirt “only has a little chi-chi out, not my cho-cho”, adding: “You should never “come to work with a green cut crease”.

After achieving overnight fame with her videos, the internet sensation has quit her checkout job, appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and updated fans that she’s now able to finance her gender transition.

Not only have content creators and celebrities been jumping on the trend, but even companies like Nasa have joined the bandwagon.

“You see how Earth looks in space? It’s very demure, very mindful. Earth looks very cutesy in the solar system,” the space agency posted on X.

Lebron has explained that her motto is “obviously a joke” and while the definition of being demure means to be “reserved, modest, and shy”, she isn’t here to promote a Bridgerton-esque lifestyle for women.

Most content creators have been mocking the trend by subtly joking about how to be demure while being totally extravagant.

For example, RuPaul explains how he reads a book in a considerate way, while Penn Badgley, who plays Joe Goldberg in Netflix’s You, posted a TikTok saying: “playing a romantic icon for five seasons, I’m very modest, I’m very mindful.”

Demure has also made its way into our fashion – content creator Ambika Dhir says being “demure and mindful in outfits is about well-crafted quiet luxury, chic outfits and a strong personal style that grabs attention without being shouty”.

Similarly, Isa Lavahun, a social media strategist, says she interprets Lebron’s demure catchphrase as the “embodiment of subtle self-love – knowing that as long as you carry yourself with grace and empathy, no other opinion matters”.

But, not everyone sees it like that.

One Tik Toker, Sabrina Thulander, says she’s “always interpreted demure as a negative thing, like how a Victorian era man wants his wife to act. It all feels very trad wife to me”.

But some women have been leaning into the trad wife trend, which has risen in popularity due to the artistic portrayal of women in shows like Bridgerton and Downtown Abbey who are demure and mindful.

Author Gershom Mabaquiao explains that the trend started off being about “the unseriousness of self-presentation”, but since it has become bigger than social media and permeated society, it’s being interpreted in a “very literal way”.

The fact some people are posting about being demure, cutesty and mindful in a serious way shows “how nuances are lost when messages travel from the high-context in-groups to the low-context outgroups”, he says.

“The sarcasm and deliberate ‘double standards’ of the joke has gotten lost.”

Nöel Wolf, a cultural and linguistic expert, says the word demure dates back to the 1600s, and was used a lot in the 1800s to describe young women who were modest and reserved”.

The recontextualisation of the word now shows “how old language can take on a new life in the hands of the younger generations”.

As TikTok trends come and go at an increasingly rapid pace, it’s hard to know which word or phrase will be the next big thing.

A former English teacher and now content creator who goes by the name of ExemplaryPotato, shares new words every week on the platform.

In response to demure, he has shared a video explaining the meaning of vituperative, an antonym to demure.

Wolf says the phrases that Gen Z have used this year are unexpected and obscure, like raw dogging, rizz and bed rotting.

He added that demure isn’t the “only archaic word making a comeback this year” as Inside Out 2 brought “ennui” back into fashion, while Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department re-popularised the word “tryst”.

“There’s a tendency for online trends to yo-yo: we moved from the clean girl aesthetic to brat summer as a rejection of that, and now to “demure”, so, there’s a good chance that whatever the next trend is, it’ll be far from demure.”

French police say they have arrested a man suspected of setting fires and causing an explosion outside a synagogue in a southern resort.

Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said “the alleged perpetrator” was detained on Saturday. He added that the police had shown “great professionalism”.

French media reported that the suspect was shot and injured by police after he opened fire on the officers who came to arrest him in the city of Nîmes.

Earlier on Saturday, a police officer was injured in the blast outside the Beth Yaacov synagogue in the nearby seaside resort of La Grande-Motte.

The police officer’s injuries are not said to be life-threatening, following the blast between 08:00 and 08:30 local time (07:00-07:30 BST) on Saturday.

Five people, including the rabbi, were inside the synagogue at the time, authorities said.

The explosion was caused by two cars which were set alight outside

Police sources told French media that one of the vehicles contained a hidden gas canister.

The suspect – who was reportedly carrying a Palestinian flag – also set fire to several entrance doors of the synagogue.

Jewish community leader Yonathan Arfi said the incident was “an attempt to kill Jews” and seemed to have been timed to target Saturday morning worshippers.

President Emmanuel Macron said the incident was “a terrorist act”.

One eyewitness, who asked to remain anonymous, told the BBC: “Just as we were coming round the last corner, there was a huge explosion – a fireball into the air.

“It was surreal, like a film. We didn’t go any further.”

Prime Minister Gabriel Attal and Mr Darmanin visited the site on Saturday evening. Both had earlier condemned the attack, with Mr Attal calling it “an antisemitic act”.

“What happened here shocks and scandalises all Republicans in our country,” Mr Attat said during the visit.

“Because the reality is that once again, French Jews have been targeted, attacked because of their beliefs.”

Mr Attal said an “absolute tragedy” had been “narrowly avoided” as “there would have been victims” if the synagogue had been full of worshippers.

Both Mr Attal and Mr Darmanin said security would be strengthened outside synagogues.

“I want to assure our Jewish fellow citizens and the municipality of my full support,” Mr Darmanin said earlier in the day.

The French Jewish community already live under high security, with many synagogues and Jewish schools under police protection.

A January 2024 report by the Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) said there had been a nearly threefold increase of antisemitic acts in France between 2022 and 2023.

In May, police shot dead a man after a synagogue in the north-western city of Rouen was set on fire.

In 2015, two days after the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine, four people were murdered in a hostage attack on a kosher supermarket.

The explosion comes amid heightened concerns for Europe’s Jewish community, after the latest survey from the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) published last month found that Jewish people in the bloc continue to face high levels of antisemitism.

More than 8,000 Jews in 13 EU countries, including Germany and France, were interviewed. Some 96% said they had encountered antisemitism in their daily lives.

There has been widespread condemnation of the attempted arson attack across France’s political spectrum.

Left-wing politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon called it an “intolerable crime”, while the far-right National Rally’s Jordan Bardella said it was “a criminal and antisemitic act”.